ENIGMAS OF PSYGHICAL RESEARCH iiiiiHiiiiiiiiililiHiilillilllliliiiiiiilllaiiilii .^nlliiliiii: i ipH' Hi III 1 liiiiiijiiiiliilii ii iMiiii: i i! 1 I il !! ! ill 1 1 i I ! lu; hi i !i H ihill iilliiiiliilli'iiini ill illHlliuiiiiiiiiiliiill Cop}Tigli( N ^0 copyri(;ht deposit. \^ ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RE SEARCH BY JAMES H.HYSLOP,Ph.D.,IL.D. FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF ETHICS AND LOGIC IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Author of *' Science and a Future Life,''^ etc, HERBERT B. TURNER & CO. BOSTON - - - 1906 Copyright, 1906 iSp |)erbert 48* Currwr Si Co. Entered at Stationers'* Hall London Published March, 1906 LIBRARY of CONGRESS TwoCoDies Received FEB 26 1906 ^ Coayriehl Entry CLASS <:t ^Xc. No, ' ^ COPY S. ^ COLONIAL PRESS Printed by C. H, Simonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U. S. A. ^ DEDICATED TO WHOSE FAITH REQUIRES NO SCIENCE FOR ITS PROTECTION AND WHOSE SYMPATHY AND APPRECIATION IN A TRYING MOMENT MAKE IT A PLEASURE TO IN- SCRIBE MORE THAN THE USUAL ACKNOWL- EDGMENT PREFACE The present volume may be considered as a sup- plement to the one on Science and a Future Life, which has been pubHshed. In that work I gave a very inadequate summary of the phenomena bearing upon Telepathy and Apparitions, and I said nothing what- ever regarding several other types of phenomena hav- ing an equal scientific interest. I was occupied in that volume with facts related more directly to the question of survival after death, especially as experi- mentally supported. In the present book I have seized the opportunity to go over the whole field of the supernormal. While I have discussed Telepathy and Apparitions more exhaustively than before, I have added much material on Crystal Gazing, Coinci- dental Dreams, Clairvoyance, and Premonitions, with some illustrations of Mediumistic Phenomena without involving these with the more scientific case of Mrs. Piper. I have tried to give all of them that unity of interest and meaning which are due to the super- normal having psychological character and demand- ing more scientific investigation than it has yet re- ceived. The nature of the present work must not be mis- understood. I have not quoted the various experi- ences in the work for purposes of scientific proof of a transcendental world, and much less as evidence of what such a world is, if the facts should prove it, but as evidence of something which needs further vor vii viii ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH vestigation. Taken collectively the facts have an impressive character for some general conclusion, but those who understand psychology will want to re- serve their judgment for something more than a probable supernormal. Speculations ignoring normal experience must still wait awhile, and perhaps ought always to be discouraged on the part of any but the most expert. The reader may wonder why the illustrations chosen are so old. It will be noticed that some of them extend back into the previous generation, and I shall no doubt be asked why I have not included incidents of a more recent origin. The answer to an inquiry of this kind is very easy. I selected the cases quoted because they had received the recogni- tion of a scientific body, and do not represent the judgment of any single person. I am here dealing, not with experiences which individually might have no value, but with matter that has received the imprimatur of the Society for Psychical Research, and whatever its value to others, it bears an impress- iveness that it would not have if presented by an individual. There are plenty of recent phenomena having the same character, and I have a number of cases in my own possession. But I should not think of publishing them until they received the considera- tion of scientific men. There are perhaps more than a thousand similar instances in the files of the Ameri- can Bramch of the parent society, but these require systematic treatment and publication in a scientific manner before they can obtain attention in this work. The nature of the phenomena is such, and the per- PREFACE ix plexities of the problem are such, that only large collections of incidents can count for scientific pur- poses, and we can safely use only such as have re- ceived the indorsement of an intelhgent body of men. Besides, I do not wish in this work to assume respon- sibiHty for the facts, but to give some unity of inter- pretation to such as have been deemed by others as worthy of attention. As to recent experiences I can only point a moral regarding their absence in this work, after what I have just said. All that is wanted to give recent phenomena of the kind quoted a proper consideration is the endowment fund that will enable qualified men to examine their credentials. Men cannot expect us to give scientific character to newspaper stories. Very thorough investigation is necessary to make ex- periences of this kind worthy of any but a humorous interest, and the sooner that the public learns the need of endowment in this field equal to that for polar expeditions and deep-sea dredging, the sooner it will have some intelligent knowledge of the subject. It is certainly as deserving as football and yacht races. The matter has been left too long to the private resources of a few individuals, and expecta- tions which are entertained of these are a satire on human judgment. It is no light task to collect a census of coincidental experiences having scientific value for proving the supernormal, and it should have the financial support commensurate with its importance on any theory whatsoever of the facts. The great religious forces of the past civihzation are dissolving into pohte forms and rituals, and the pas- X ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH sionate interest of men is turning either to science or to illusion and folly for guidance. Science has obtained the mantle and heritage of religion for the education and direction of human belief, and the sooner it takes up its duties in that field the more important its message to man. James H. Hyslop. New York, December 9, 1905. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. THE RESIDUES OF SCIENCE 11. THE ANCIENT ORACLES . in. CRYSTAL VISION: HISTORY IV. CRYSTAL GAZING: EXPERIMENTS V. TELEPATHY . VI. DREAMS . VII. APPARITIONS Vin. CLAIRVOYANCE IX. PREMONITIONS X. MEDIUMISTIC PHENOMENA XI. RETROSPECT AND VATICINATION PAGE 1 11 40 50 92 114 183 272 306 332 391 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH CHAPTER I THE RESIDUES OF SCIENCE When Chemistry began studying the slag of old smelting-f urnaces ; when Astronomy began to in- quire about the stories of falling meteors; when Physics began to investigate the properties of amber and the compass; when Medicine turned a willing ear to the claims of hypnotism and suggestion; when Roentgen caught a strange shadow picture in his laboratory and Madame Curie found certain anomalies in pitchblende, curiosity was rewarded with discoveries that have done much to revolutionize philosophic and scientific theories. The residual phenomena of nature, caught at some odd angle of its course, always carry with them the suspicion of undiscovered deeps in its alembic, and wise is the man who allows no glimpse of its wonders to escape his attention and interest. But his expectant vision must not lose sight of that regular order which had seemed to leave no chance for variation and exception. He must respect the old facts and laws that guided suit for truth before he found it necessary to launch on an unknown sea. There should be no break in the transition to new knowledge. In an age which has cast the conquests I 2 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH of the past to the winds and has started an excited hunt for a new world it is well to have compass and rudder from experience. Yet the look windward is only a precaution against the shoals that lie in the path of new interests, needing guidance and reflec- tion on the forces that brought us hither and that have concealed those facts which carry the mysteries of the world into the reach of knowledge. Evolution apparently allows no stoppage in the opportunity for inquiry, and when it is ready for a revelation it quietly throws on the surface of a beaten shore some new pearl which only wisdom can value, and woe be- tide the student if, in perceiving the gift of fortune, he neglects to seek its meaning as a beacon light in the great ocean of ignorance. It may take him long to find an interpretation consistent with the massive knowledge of the past, but when he does find it the widened horizon of truth and hope only reveals in the misty distance a limitless path of discovery, while achievement and prophecy may blend in one harmonious symphony. The history of man's most assured beliefs has been associated with the most familiar phenomena. The nature of land and sea, the forms of organic life, animal and vegetable, the development of social and poHtical institutions, the origin of the cosmos, and the progress of industrial life have absorbed his mental and practical interests and thrust from attention all sporadic phenomena which did not at once resolve themselves into the schemes of his normal thought and activity. Only when science had to look for new worlds to conquer could it be persuaded to THE RESIDUES OF SCIENCE S venture into the field of those obscure events that were generally forgotten as soon as they occurred. Besides science in its well-known physical world has been forced to deal with so many exceptional facts that it is also forced to lend an attentive ear to any claims of still further residual phenomena. Its own progress it at stake in the matter. To cease inquiry with only such facts as consist with its past achievements and to ignore new facts which appar- ently conflict with the past or certainly widen our knowledge is to yield to the enemy and to allow its own system to atrophy. It is ever compelled to push forward or to accept limitations to its inquiries and opinions. The Greeks knew the properties of amber, but they built no electric cars. Hiero was familiar with the nature of steam, but he made no locomotives. Antiquity could make iridescent glass, but it knew neither the telescope nor the spectroscope, and so studied astronomy under adverse limitations. Ancient philosophy had its theory of the cosmos, but it had no guidance from chemistry. Electricity, the expan- sion of steam, the refraction of light, and the affini- ties of matter were then quite as residual phenomena as are telepathy and apparitions to-day. But the latter have not yet secured the attention and respect that their claims justify or demand, though they may conceal as important conclusions for man's de- velopment as ever came from the study of electricity or steam. The reason for this is not far to seek. The residual phenomena which to-day excite so much interest are associated with a theory of things 4 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH which physical science supposed it had successfully dislodged. It has become accustomed to residual facts within its own domain, but it is loth to admit the existence of facts that limit that domain or demand the acceptance of a larger than the ordinary material world. So many conquests have been made by ig- noring a spiritual system, or by limiting its influence in the order of knowledge and things, that the estab- lished conceptions can resent almost any amount of interference, and keep at bay ideas that have so long been associated with losing causes. In all ages certain men have invariably been dis- satisfied with what they could feel or see or hear, and leave to imagination things real or apparent beyond the senses. This region was a world of mystery and miracle, occupying their interest and speculations, and they felt free to people it with agencies like themselves. The shadows of Fate, thrown on the vision by the inexorable law of nature, were relieved by imagining a world of warring spirits repeating in their ethereal life all the virtues and vices of man. Mythology, therefore, deified all the forces of nature and animated the very rocks and streams with life. Witness the names of Apollo, Minerva, Athena, Pluto, Vulcan, Proserpine, Neptune, and the nymphs, Nereids, sprites, and demons as numerous as the very elements. Nothing escaped the eye for the super- natural. The knowledge that came within the reach of the senses was spiritless and dull, and fancy ever soared into other worlds to obtain food for human passion. The anthropomorphic instinct never wholly sub- THE RESIDUES OF SCIENCE 5 mits to disenchantment. It keeps ahead of science, and seizes every new fact for its own purposes, and by sheer force of necessity starts in its hereditary adversary the attitude of hostility. This adversary is always cautious and suspicious of the new, and after its ages of experience in exorcising the super- natural pursues its enemy with malicious persistency. The materialist will have nothing but his " natural," even if he has to change the meaning of his terms to preserve an apparent consistency. That is to say, he is ever ready to usurp cover of the new by ex- tending the meaning of " nature " and " matter," already strained beyond endurance, while he clings to the implications of their traditional import long after they have lost their validity. There is no elasticity of mind too great for his audacity, and he gloats like a conqueror over his imaginary triumphs, which are concessions of territory in all but the name. Committed by the very principle of his science to the study of facts and the limitation of speculation, he never sees any more than does his opponent the fu- tility of preserving his mental self-control. He is bent upon one Procrustean act as his antagonist is upon another. He would curtail the growth of knowledge as the other would illegitimately extend it. One will have only the " natural " and the other must add the " supernatural," while each forgets that both terms have long since lost their meaning and opposition. The residual phenomena that give all this trouble are within the province of psychology. Some of them are actually physical facts and are apparently classified as such, but they purport to come from the 6 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH agency of discarnate spirits and their influence on matter, organic and inorganic, and are always asso- ciated with what is called a medium; a living human being without whom the alleged phenomena sup- posedly would not occur. Moreover, there are the additional facts of the observers and their defective accounts of the phenomena. The consequence is that they have to be classed as psychological in interest and character on one side of their occurrence, and this without regard to the question whether they are genuine or fraudulent. If they are fraudulent, we have the problem of criminal psychology, on the one hand, and that of dupes on the other. There is an intermediate type in which the medium may be abnormal, a neurotic, subject to fits of som- nambulism, trance, or multiple personality. In such a case acts may be done that would be ascribed to conscious trickery under other conditions, but which must be qualified as irresponsible if done in a state of trance or somnambulism. It is possible thus, in such phenomena, to reduce the amount of conscious and responsible fraud while we have interesting psychological facts of an important kind for all parties concerned. On the other hand, if any of the phenomena are genuine and are credibly supernor- mal, whether as mental or physical in character, they have a transcendent importance either as events closely related to illusion or as facts involving de- cidedly revolutionary conclusions in both physical and mental science. The other types are not disputed in their character. They are admittedly psychologi- cal. THE RESIDUES OF SCIENCE 7 The various phenomena which I have in mind as residues of science are alleged raps and knockings, the alleged movement of physical objects without contact, technically called telekinetic, alleged telep- athy or thought-transference, alleged clairvoyance or perception of objects and events at a distance and without the ordinary sensory impressions, apparitions, or ghosts, whether of the Hving or the dead, and al- leged mediumistic communications with the dead. I shall include in these the consideration of the ancient oracles as being the source in antiquity of all the phe- nomena which we now separate into so many types. Their consideration only shows that the claims for the supernormal are not new and that it has only been the progress of a scientific view of things that has displaced the ancient source of mystery, or forced it to veil its identity under other names. But as the phenomena mentioned are perennial, and as they characterize the annals of the civihzed and uncivilized alike, there will be no escape for the scientific intellect from the duty of reducing them to some order and explanation. It matters not what the explanation may be, whether it points to something that transcends the known laws of nature or whether it discovers them all to be products of fraud and illusion. Either one of these conclusions carries a freight of great value to the human race. On the one hand, we cannot afford to allow illusion to prop- agate itself uncorrected in these democratic times when religion has lost its creed and its power. Those who are inclined to accept every allegation of the supernormal and of the supernatural, so-called, that 8 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH comes along have the ballot and hold the balance of power, and their social and political interests will take the hue of their intellectual and religious be- liefs. They require education and disillusioning on alleged psychic phenomena quite as much as in economic and political institutions. These facts are certainly capable of quite as serious study and expla- nation as ancient religious rites and ceremonies, and the results can be made fully as helpful as these. On the other hand, if any of the phenomena actually possess the supernatural character attributed to them, they are among the most important ever opened to the speculative vision of man, especially if they throw any light upon his spiritual nature and destiny. The aristocratic attitude of ridicule regarding them will not serve any intelligent purpose. It will only reveal the shortcomings of the man who indulges this spirit. Persecution is the best encouragement of life, and the only sane conduct in the case is the careful study of claims that have much more strength, even if false, than in the last century. The simple reason for this is the fact that the alleged phenomena are no longer isolated. For centuries each individual told his experiences to his friends and died without recording them. At no time did he give his experiences scientific credentials or record, and the result was that they were buried in oblivion ; or perhaps the few that did get perma- nent expression were too few to influence the scien- tific mind, dependent as it is on quantity more than mere quality of facts. But a body of men to-day and for the last twenty-five years has been collecting THE RESIDUES OF SCIENCE 9 these experiences and recording tliem with such in- vestigation as has been possible. It has gathered them from all quarters of the globe, regardless of their genuine or fraudulent character, if the real or alleged facts bore any evidence of being useful to science in any respect whatever. Though these facts may not prove anything supernormal, they suggest it, and make scientific investigation imperative. The records, however, are such as to eliminate many of the objections that are applicable to the isolated nar- rative. We may disqualify a single experience easily enough by pointing out its exposure to the charges of chance, illusion, fraud, dreaming, de- fective memory, or misinterpretation. But we can- not so easily break the force of a large collection of such incidents, especially when they agree m those crucial incidents bearing upon the super- normal and have such credentials as would affect a jury in a murder case. We can hardly suppose that any one of the objections named, and much less all of them together, wall be applicable to many thou- sands of cases having a common character related to supernormal faculty, consistently related, and as well accredited as the stories we do believe. We may break each stick in the bundle by itself; but it will not be so easy to break the bundle together. Conse- quently, with large numbers of coincidental phe- nomena well supported in their important aspects and bearing at least superficial evidence of an un- usual and perhaps supernormal character, we can- not escape the duty to give them serious attention, no matter what the outcome. 10 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Being sporadic phenomena, much more sporadic than unusual physical phenomena, they can be gathered for scientific purposes only over large areas of time and space in order to make them scientif- ically impressive. The whole world must be their territory and centuries their history in order to as- sure ourselves of an intelligent view of them. Indeed, we shall have to educate the very sources of them into accurate observers, careful recorders, and dis- interested thinkers regarding them. In any case their claims are now too formidable to dismiss them with a sneer. The astronomer neglected the peas- ant's stories of meteors and ridiculed them until this could no longer be done, and then appropriated the proved fact of them to help him out of his difficulties in his theory of the constitution of the sun's heat. The French Academy would not receive the report of its first committee on Mesmer's work in Paris, packed a second committee to condemn it, published its report, and all to meet the restoration of the sub- ject to enforced scientific attention by Doctor Braid fifteen years afterward. It will be the same with the residual phenomena of mind, whether the conclusion be what is desired or not. ^tj^. CHAPTER II THE ANCIENT ORACLES Modern civilization can hardly appreciate what was represented in antiquity by the oracles unless it be familiar with present-day mediumship and spirit- ualism. They have the same essential character, though there are differences which distinguish them so sharply that only the philosophic or the scien- tific mind will discover their identity. The article in the Encyclopoedia Britannica remarks that it " was a universal belief in the ancient world that there is a capacity in the human mind to divine the will of God," and refers to a saying of Plato in support of the view. Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in his most fasci- nating article on the same subject, connects the oracles with ancient religion and suggests a connect- ing link between the past and the present of religion in these phenomena. But it is easy to misunderstand the meaning of any language associating the oracles with the " Divine " and " religion." These terms inevitably have the import of all the ages that have followed the cessation of the oracles and the decay of ancient religions. " God " stands in modem times for a highly sub- limated conception, idealized by all the moral prog- ress that has been achieved by the centuries since the fall of Greco-Roman civilization, and hence represents a being or inteUigence without human 11 ^rd 12 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH limitations and with a will more or less inscrutable according to the standards of man. " Religion " is the worship and obedience of this being, with all the philosophic intelligence and culture of the ages associated with this attitude of mind, the ceremonials of antiquity having gradually lost their significance in the process of change. Hence when we speak of " God " and " religion " to-day we think of customs, beliefs, and conceptions, which have wholly elimi- nated from their associations all the actions and cere- monies which, in antiquity, actually defined the nature of the divine and of religion. To say that the oracles were essentially related to ancient relig- ious institutions is to state an important truth, but it does not carry with it any certain conception of what the religious institutions of the ancients were. We may even have the oracles fully described to us and learn no clear idea of what " religion " was for those times. We are all familiar with the anthropomorphic nature of ancient ideas of the " divine," and yet we hardly realize the nature and extent of it until we read their mythology and think of the average ignor- ance that prevailed. The gods were often deified heroes, often also nothing but deified physical forces, with little difference between the man and nature that were thus deified. The gods had their jealousies, their loves and hates, their human passions, their limi- tations, and were in every way the capricious beings which such an age considered as ideal powers. The gods, too, were as numerous as the forces or ab- stract principles that men assumed in the order of THE ANCIENT ORACLES IS things. There was no such moral idealization of them as appeared in the Judaistic conception of the divine and also in the Christian, taken from Judaism, after it had been reduced to a monotheistic form. Monotheism never took any serious hold on Greece or Rome. The philosopher Xenophanes at- tacked the polytheism of his time and insisted that the divine was but one. ^schylus gave expression to the same conception, and so perhaps all the more intelligent men of that period. The philosophers, where they accepted or coquetted with religion at all, were monotheistic in sympathy, but the reaction against the extravagant anthropomorphism of their age tended to carry them over to an impersonal view of the divine. The chasm that separated them from the common mind was almost impassable. What- ever religion the philosopher had was of the dry light of reason, as perhaps is the case in all periods, and dissociated itself from the superstitions of the multi- tude. There was no disposition to appropriate any of the common ideas and practices, except in defer- ence to social and political expediency. The un- educated classes had their freedom in religious mat- ters while the educated had the government. There was no consciously social function associated with religion. It did not generally have a system of sal- vation beyond the grave connected with its duties and services, as later religion had. The interest of religion for the ancient devotee was in his daily life and actions and mainly that part of them affecting his personal interests rather than social duties. With an aristocratic government not interested in relig- 14 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ious matters, except as means for protecting its power, there was no reason for reforming religion, and so it was left with its practices among the com- mon people, intelligence and culture identifying themselves with science and art. There was no common life and interest, as in democratic times, between the two classes that made up the community. The superstitions of the one were so revolting that they would not bear the analysis of the other, and the rationalism of the intelligent classes could not be appreciated by the anthropomorphic imagination of those who were governed. It took another religion to introduce a social and ethical ferment into the every-day life of man. Greek thought never satisfactorily idealized the future, and though it did not like the present it strove to beautify it by art, and in this did not feel the re- sistance to its accomplishments that pervaded the Christian conception of nature. It was possible to see the excellent side of nature, and as it was better than the insane and purgatorial future, which the belief in a future life carried with it, there was no such repugnance to the carnal life as characterized the conception of the Christian who viewed it with the spectacles of a highly idealized immortality and divine government. The Christian reversed the point of view of the Greek and led to the neglect of the oracles, whose revelations were either of the sordid and carnal type which the ideal would not accept or were of that trivial character which the ideal would dismiss as long as it had any tenacity of hold on human conviction. Consequently the new view, irre- THE ANCIENT ORACLES 15 trievably committed to a golden age after death, to the moral and social equality of men before the judgment of the divine, to the doctrine that personal salvation depended at least partly upon a proper relation to other members of the community, and to the depreciation of the sensuous life as it exalted -the spiritual, was qualified equally to destroy the authority of the oracles and to offend the aristocracy of philosophy and politics. In all its vicissitudes and in spite of pagan inheritances this view has sus- tained its contrasts with ancient religions and was as little qualified to understand the oracles as it was justified in ignoring them, while it strove to convert the power and influence of both philosophy and poli- tics into servants of the people against the tyranny of favored classes. In this it ultimately succeeded, and invoked the intelligence which had no need of oracles while it discouraged their guidance of the ignorant. Though it retained some elements of anthropomorphism in its conception of God it chose a middle ground between the excesses of polythe- ism and the impersonal hue of a monotheistic panthe- ism, and in this manner gave such dignity to the divine that its revelations could no longer condescend to the trivialities and equivocations of an oracle. Greek religion, when it was connected with the oracles, offended aesthetics as much as it did intelli- gence, and only when it was rationalized in art did it receive any interest for the cultured classes. The consequence was that its rites and ceremonies were left to the ignorant and superstitious, and these were a larger class than in modern times. The ease 16 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH with which knowledge is disseminated has extended scepticism and disHke for the " supernatural." But there was less opportunity and no disposition in an- tiquity to educate the masses, and hence they had for social and political reasons to be left with their religion. This took mostly the form of consulting the oracles or performing rites of sacrifice to appease the angry divinities. Christianity came and had but one medium between the individual and the deity, and, apart from his intercession, each man had to work out his own salvation, so that again the intel- lectual tendency in its system was to dispense with the oracles. I shall say nothing of the savage ancestry of the oracles, though they probably trace their lineage to the practices of primitive tribes growing out of ghost and other experiences. The point of interest for the psychic researcher begins with that form of rite and ceremony which represented a somewhat or- ganized effort to consult agencies supposed to be in communication with the divine or deceased human beings. These were especially apparent in the ora- cles, whose origin is certainly in the twilight of fable. But as culture and intelligence advanced they were either discredited or were left with the ignorant classes to make of them what they could. That they were the precursors of our modern mediums is evident in the character of their phe- nomena, though their relation to the religious prac- tices of the time conceals their identity. Moreover, the influence of Christianity to discourage their use, especially as they were associated with the supposed THE ANCIENT ORACLES 17 demoniac possession, has forced them to disconnect their practices from religion and make it a purely mercenary vocation. This is calculated to put them under more careful scrutiny. But ancient civiliza- tion depended so much upon the control of the igno- rant and superstitious that the identification of the oracles with religion was indispensable and ensured them a power equal to that of the priest. There were temptations, as now, to abuse that power in the interest of various personal and political causes. That there was such abuse is apparent in the scep- ticism displayed by those intelligent people who were sufficiently impressed with the phenomena to investi- gate or consult them. Socrates, himself the subject of an apparently external voice guiding him in some of his actions, went to test the trustworthiness of the oracle at Delphi. Croesus sent messengers to consult the same oracle in his own affairs, but would not trust it until he had tried an experiment to determine its genuineness, ^schylus was aware of the dan- gers accompanying the interpretation of the oracles ; for he puts into the mouth of lo in his Prometheus Bound the statement that her sire had " dispatched many a messenger to Pytho and Dodona to consult the oracles, that he might learn from them what it behoved him to do, that he might do what was well- pleasing to the divinity. They came bringing back a report that was ambiguously worded, indistinct, and obscurely delivered." It soon became a proverb even in antiquity that the oracles were ambiguous and unreliable. Any catalogue of their sayings would illustrate this in a large degree. Aristotle, 18 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH one of the coolest and most cautious intellects of Greece, had to face the stories of oracular dreams and similar phenomena, and his verdict, showing the scepticism of the educated classes, was that " it is neither easy to despise such things, nor yet to believe them." Sporadic stories might easily be referred to myth or legend, but antiquity was crowded with oracles, and their votaries were too numerous to dis- miss every incident with the same answer; hence we may well understand the attitude of men like Aristotle without accepting his tolerant conviction. It seems to have been a fact that many of the best intellects of ancient times accepted the genuineness of some of the oracles after eliminating much for fraud and illusion. Successful instances had their adventurous imitators then as well as now. This is no place to discuss the nature of Greek religion, but I may briefly indicate that its chief features were found in the functions of the priest- hood and in the mantic art. The mantic art was based upon the idea that the divine and human were in close relation and that the advice and aid of the divine could be sought through appropriate means. " Deity and the world of nature and men," says Curtius, " stand, in the view of this devout faith, in inseparable connection. If, then, the moral sys- tem which underlies human aff^airs suffer any dis- turbance this must manifest itself also in the world of nature. Unusual natural phenomena in heaven or on earth, eclipses of the sun or moon, earthquakes, pestilence, famine, are signs that the divine wrath is aroused by wrong-doing, and it is important that hL.. THE ANCIENT ORACLES 19 mortals know how to understand and take advantage of these divine hints. " For this a special capacity is requisite ; not a capacity which can be learnt like a human art or science, but rather a peculiar state of grace in the case of single individuals and single families whose ears and eyes are opened to the divine revelations, and who participate more largely than the rest of mankind in the divine spirit. Accordingly, it is their office and calling to assert themselves as organs of the divine will; they are justified in opposing their authority to every power in the world." It was the priesthood to whom the interpretation of the signs of nature fell, and the study of omens and sacrifices illustrated this function. Whether this was the most primitive of their functions it is not necessary to decide, but whether it was or not, the priesthood continued this rite down to the decline and fall of ancient civilization. Whatever power they possessed was due less to its political character than to the national reverence for their wisdom and hon- esty. They became the sole interpreters of the ora- cles and all that was connected with the mantic art, which was the means employed to establish communi- cation between the divine and human. The priest- hood, however, were not the direct agencies for the communications, but were the interpreters of them, and so had to rely upon those exceptionally endowed persons or instruments which could come into closer contact with the divine, and whom we should to-day call mediums. " The god himself," continues Curtius, " chooses so ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the organs of his communications; and, as a sign that it is no human wisdom and art which reveals the divine will, Apollo speaks through the mouth of fee- ble girls and women. The state of inspiration is by no means one of specially heightened powers, but the human being's own powers — nay, own conscious- ness — are, as it were, extinguished, in order that the divine voice may be heard all the louder; the secret communicated by the god resembles a load oppressing the breast it visits ; it is a clairvoyance from which no satisfaction accrues to the mind of the seer. This seer or sibyl is accordingly not her- self capable of revelation; the things announced by her are as incomprehensible to her as to her hearers ; so that an interpretation is necessary to enable men to avail themselves of the prophecy. For this em- ployment those persons and families who, by their administration of his religious worship, stood near- est to the god seemed most naturally qualified; and this is the point at which the mantic art and the priesthood, which originally have nothing in common between them, first enter into a momentous connec- tion.'* It is thus apparent what power would naturally fall to the priesthood, and it would be useful to the race in proportion to the intelligence and honesty of its use, and any abuse of the power would be 'dis- covered or undiscovered in proportion to the culture of those who appealed to the oracles. It was, of course, hard for any institution to combine intelli- gently the practices of the mantic art, as handed down from tradition, and the results of growth in THE ANCIENT ORACLES 31 knowledge. The reading of omens comports as little with the studj of nature as it was indulged by Aris- totle and Epicurus as crossing one's self does with the chemical investigations of the laboratory. The advance of knowledge and of that view of nature which comes from the observation of its regular ac- tion, instead of coincidences like those claimed of astrology, must ever lead to the discredit of all such methods of interpreting the course of nature as is supposed to embody itself in consulting omens or resorting to magic. Hence as intelligence advanced in Greece, whatever value had to be assigned to the mantic art, it had to be made subservient to public uses and to the more intelligent interpretation of the world. We shall see in this the growth of that feature of it which ultimately led to the extinction of the ora- cles as sources of usable and practical information. In the earlier development of culture circumstances joined mystery with religion, and as that culture advanced it endeavored to harmonize as best it could the weird practices of magic, omens, and sacrifices with the more sober and rational knowledge of science. In the meantime and before the rise of philosophic reflection, when the functions of the priesthood were usurped by laym.en, the poets and the philosophers, the priest was the repository of all the useful knowledge that the race had acquired. " Thus the oracles became centres of culture, and that was the source of their power. After the culture of the immigrants and natives of any particular locality had become equalized by means of mutual communi- iA S2 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH cations, other foundations were needed to keep up the superior power once acquired by the priestly famiHes. These they obtained in the first place by taking eager measures in their own interest for the maintenance in their own circle of a scholastic drill, by which great readiness and assurance in answering the ques- tions proposed were secured. If they were questions touching the future, questions which no human being could answer with certainty, it was permissible with sagacious foresight to make the god answer in such a manner that the event could in no case prove him to have been in error. Questions into the decision of which the priests preferred not to enter they might reject on suitable grounds. These, it must be re- membered, were by no means always questions to be answered from a knowledge of the future ; but as a rule advice and counsel were sought in arduous undertakings, decisions in case of dispute, and in all manner of human difficulties ; in all of which even a mere impartial judgment might be of great use to the situation. Moreover, for many the ora- cle became a blessing, from the mere fact that after a long and anxious time of doubt they were driven to a fixed resolve, which they now cheerfully exe- cuted, trusting to the divine sanction. Moreover, the priesthoods were far too clever not to keep up a close and uninterrupted connection with all the more important points of the Hellenic world. " Not only through the widely spread Appolline priesthoods, but through personal relations of every kind, they had an accurate knowledge of the social condition of all the more important Hellenic places. THE ANCIENT ORACLES S3 They knew the state of party questions before the parties appeared before them ; they possessed a clear judgment as to the external dangers and internal difficulties of the single communities ; they even had ways and means of seeing through individuals before they took the fate of the latter into their hands." Knowledge obtained in this way might be used or abused, but the priesthoods knew well, at least in the healthier state of their age, that their power and the confidence of the oracle seeker rested upon the extent to which their decisions conformed to truth and justice. When Hellenic civilization lost its primitive firmness and morality the tempta- tion would arise to abuse that power, and hence the scepticism of the oracles which arose in men like Socrates, Croesus, ^schylus, and Aristotle. Though there were connecting links between Greek and Roman religions, the latter seems not to have been so closely related to the search for oracular revelations. " The Latin worship," says Mommsen, " was grounded mainly on man's enjoyment of earthly pleasures, and only in a subordinate degree on his fear of the wild forces of nature; it con- sisted preeminently, therefore, in expressions of joy, m lays and songs, in games and dances, and above all in banquets. Comparatively slight traces are to be found among the Romans of belief in ghosts, fear of enchantments, or of dealing in mysteries. Ora- cles and prophecy never acquired the importance in Italy which they obtained in Greece, and never were able to exercise a serious control over public or pri- vate life." ^4 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ' What it is that turns the religious instinct of one nation to one type of worship and that of another to a different type need not occupy our inquiries. It is for us here only a fact of no special importance in understanding the actual place of the oracles in Greek religion. Nor need we inquire how the ora- cles came to possess the relative importance given them. That also is for us a mere fact, though we admit that the same general influences in man's rela- tion to nature produced the oracles as well as the more rationalistic view of the mysterious. It is prob- able that the union of the oracles with the functions of the priesthood was as much due to the need of protecting its power as it was to the interest in the racial religion. The Greek priesthood did not enjoy political power, though its influence was hardly less great than that of the rulers. It was the possessor of the moral and spiritual enlightenment of the com- munity, and when this was threatened by various in- fluences pohtical and intellectual it had only to ally itself with the institutions of the common people to preserve its place in the growing civihzation. It thus kept mystery right within the territory of grow- ing knowledge. The oracles in such a situation were the handy instruments of shrewd men as well as of sincere men, and in an unscientific age might easily mingle false and true, sanity and insanity, in indis- criminate confusion. The poetic temperament of the late Mr. Frederic W. H. Myers has led to a most interesting descrip- tion of both the nature and the origin of the oracles, THE ANCIENT ORACLES 25 which we may quote as saving the device of a longer history. " The attempt to define the word ' oracle ' con- fronts us at once with the difficulties of the subject. The Latin term, indeed, which we are forced to em- ploy, points specially to cases where the voice of God or spirit was actually heard, whether directly or through some human intermediary. But the cor- responding Greek term (jjuavTelov) merely signifies a seat of soothsaying, a place where divinations are obtained by whatever means. And we must not re- gard the oracles of Greece as rare and majestic phenomena, shrines founded by a full-grown myth- ology for the direct habitation of a god. Rather they are the products of a long process of evolution, the modified survivals from among countless holy places of a primitive race. " Greek literature has preserved to us abundant traces of the various causes which led to the ascrip- tion of sanctity to some particular locality. Oftenest it is some chasm or cleft in the ground, filled, per- haps, with mephitic vapors, or with the mist of a subterranean stream, or merely opening in its dark obscurity an inlet into the mysteries of the under- world. Such was the chasm of the Clarian, the Delian, the Delphian Apollo ; and such the oracle of the prophesying nymphs on Cith^ron. Such was Trophonius' cave, and his own name perhaps is only a synonym for the Mother Earth, ' in many names the one identity,' who nourishes at once and reveals. " Sometimes — as for instance at Megara, Sicyon, Orchomenus, Laodicea — the sanctity gathers around m ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH some fiairvXo^ or fetish stone, fashioned, it may be, into a column or pyramid, and probably in most cases identified at first with the god himself, though, after the invention of statuary, its significance might be obscured or forgotten. Such stones outlast all religions, and remain for us in their rude shapeless- ness the oldest memorial of the aspirations or the fears of man. " Sometimes the sacred place was merely some favorite post of observation of the flight of birds, or of lightning, like Teiresias' ' ancient seat of augury,' or the hearth from which, before the sacred embassy might start for Delphi, the Pythaists watched above the crest of Parnes for the summons of the heavenly flame. " Or it might be merely some spot where the divi- nation from bumt-ofl^erings seemed unusually true and plain, — at Olympia, for instance, where, as Pin- dar tells us, ' soothsayers divining from sacrifice make trial of Zeus who lightens clear.' It is needless to speak at length of groves and streams and moun- tain summits, which in every region of the world have seemed to bring the unseen close to man by waving mystery, or by rushing murmur, or by near- ness to the light of heaven. It is enough to under- stand that in Greece, as in other countries over which successive waves of immigration have passed, the sacred places were for the most part selected for primitive reasons, in primitive times ; then as more civilized races succeeded and Apollo came — whence and in what guise cannot here be discussed — the old shrines were dedicated to new divinities, the old sym- THE ANCIENT ORACLES ST bols were metamorphosed or disappeared. The fe- tish stones were crowned by statues, or replaced by statues and buried in the earth. The sibyls died in the temples, and the sun-god's island holds the sep- ulchre of the moon-maidens of the northern sky." Legend and history make Dodona the oldest seat of Greek oracles. There was a temple there, and Jupiter was the deity to which it was dedicated. The god was supposed to dwell in an old oak at that place, and various accounts indicate that his revelations were through the rustling of the leaves of the tree, or the resounding of the wind in the tripod that accompanied the institution of the oracles. There seems to have been no sorceress as a medium for the god, but only the priestly interpretation of physical signs by which the future was foretold. It was at a later period that the revelation took the form of mediumistic speech. The Dodonean oracle was an interpretation of the phenomena of nature, and ap- parently grew out of ancient tree worship. The oak of Shechem, where Jacob buried his false gods with their earrings, and the groves of Beersheba and other places of Judaistic note, were probably indi- cations of the same worship in Palestine, and the determined persecution which it received at the hands of those who made the Old Testament was the means of substituting a purer religion in its place. But these older types sought in the capricious phenomena of nature the indications of divine interposition in the affairs of man or the means of forecasting events of interest to the individual or the nation. The oracle of Delphi, however, was by far the most 28 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH celebrated and the most important. This was the oracle of Apollo. " It was situated about six miles inland from the shores of the Corinthian Gulf, in a rugged and romantic glen, closed on the north by the steep, wall-like cliffs of Mount Parnassus, known as the Phasdriades, or Shining Rocks, on the east and west by two minor ridges or spurs, and on the south by the irregular heights of Mount Cirphis. Between the two mountains the Pleistus flowed from east to west, and opposite the town received the brooklet of the Castalian fountain, which rose in a deep gorge in the centre of the Parnassian cliff." The origin of the oracle is only legendary, and it extended its services down to the fall of ancient civilization. Its method was quite different from that of Dodona. The oracles were delivered by the voice, and required the services of both a priest and a medium, if we may so name the mode of communicating with the divine. As in similar phenomena of modem times the prophetess went into a " trance," feigned or real, and the communications were delivered in in- coherent utterances which had to be interpreted by the priest or by those who came to consult the oracle. Doubtless the methods of interpretation were affected by traditional practices and arbitrary meanings put upon the deliverances to suit the necessity of some answer. This oracle was consulted by men of all stations in life, private or public. It was a most frequent source of counsel in matters of state policy and es- pecially regarding war. No state, it seems, would go to war without consulting the oracle. The hopes THE ANCIENT ORACLES 99 and expectations created by its success inevitably imposed heavy obligations upon its services and led to methods that have made a by-word of the " oracu- lar " in modern times, and even in the more intelligent of Greek thinkers. Human nature, depending upon the divine or upon the direction of agencies in an- other world instead of upon its own resources, de- manded of the oracle counsels that the wisest could hardly be expected to give, and the temptation was open to abuse both in the communications and in the interpretation of them. The various influences that reduced the place of religion in the national life and substituted philosophy for it forced the oracles to give enigmatic answers to inquirers, and they lost the respect of the intelligent and retained only that of the superstitious, only a trace of their surviving interest and power being found in the Neo-Plato- nists. The celebrated deliverance to Croesus, when he inquired whether he should go to war, that a great nation would be destroyed, was ambiguous enough to lead him to his own destruction. The ambiguity of the answers may often have been due as much to ignorance as to studied deception ; but whether honestly or dishonestly the reputation of the oracle had to be sustained, and with the growth of natural knowledge and of scepticism the purported communi- cations with the divine were scrutinized more care- fully until the whole system passed away under the asgis of Rome. In spite of the final degeneracy of the oracles into real or apparent fraud and illusion they bore the reputation of exhibiting phenomena which invoked 30 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the respect and consideration of many able minds. Plato gave them an important place in both his Re- public and Laws, his ideal and his practical state. As many of the oracles were supposed to be delivered in dreams and clairvoyance in some form, with a real or apparent accompaniment of oracular phenomena, even Aristotle admitted, reluctantly, perhaps, the existence of the supernormal. The Neo-Platonists dabbled in magic and theurgy, and their chief repre- sentative, Plotinus, experienced trances in which he thought he saw more deeply into the nature of things than his normal consciousness would permit. Plato thought that madness was the condition of discover- ing ultimate ti-uth. It is possible, or even probable, that men did not discriminate carefully between what was the result of priestly interpretation and what was oracular deliverance in thus accepting a genuine char- acter for some of the phenomena, but in the widely spread knowledge of these phenomena, not only in Greece but also in all nations, it would not be surpris- ing to find some of them claiming the respect even of the philosophers; and even the materialist in the Epicurean school admitted sufficient value in dreams to assert the existence of the gods upon them, though they placed them where they could not act on the physical order of the world. The sentiment of historians, ancient and modem. seems agreed that, on the whole, the influence of the oracles was for good. There will be no dis- puting, in this age, that they were associated with much that was dubious and absurd, if not positively harmful. But their practices yielded to the progress THE ANCIENT ORACLES 31' of knowledge and were identified with the best as- pect of Attic and Dorian rehgion. They were es- pecially influential in uniting Greek institutions, and whether in light or darkness did something to pre- serve the poetic side of human life. If they had not, they would have probably not survived the earlier form of their manifestation. Delphi sur- vived to the last because it was better adjusted to the spirit of Greek religion, and in this it represented a conflict between the new and the old conception of the gods. It represented a spiritual communion with the divine as opposed to the older physical messages of Dodona. Apollo, the symbol of light and eternal youth, supplanted the colder majesty of Jupiter, and wherever art in sculpture, painting, and poetry could celebrate the triumph of a better over a ruder age, it paid its homage in temples, altars, and gifts to the oracles. " In the new temple at any rate, as rebuilt in historic times," says Mr. Myers, remarking on the victory of the Delphian over the Dodonean oracle, " the moral significance of the Apolline religion was expressed in unmistakable imagery. Even as ' four great zones of sculpture ' girded the hall of Camelot, the centre of the faith which was civilizing Britain, ' with many a mystic s3nnbol ' of the victory of man, so over the portico of the Delphian god were painted or sculptured such scenes as told of the triumph of an ideal humanity over the monstrous deities which are the offspring of savage fear. " There was ' the light from the eyes of the twin faces ' of Leto's children ; there was Herakles with 32 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH golden sickle, lolaus with burning brand, withering the heads of the dying Hydra, — ' the story,' says the girl in the Ion who looks thereon, ' which is sung beside my loom ; ' there was the rider of the winged steed slaying the fire-breathing Chimaera; there was the tumult of the giants' war ; Pallas lifting the aegis against Enceladus ; Zeus crushing Mimas with the great bolt fringed with flame, and Bacchus ' with his unwarlike ivy wand ' laying another of Earth's chil- dren low." But neither art nor their actual services to Greek civilization could save the oracles. They had their darker as well as their brighter side. It was not their ambiguous answers that decided their fate alone. Culture and knowledge made their revelations too trivial and ridiculous to inspire the confidence of the educated classes, no matter what they admitted of their supernormal phenomena. The universal reli- ance upon them brought every class to them for in- struction and guidance, and the ineradicable subjec- tion of the Greek mind to external nature in its philosophy, its art, and its religion drove its popu- lation to any and every source for providential aid. The oracles were the only accepted way to penetrate the mysterious veil that hides the supernal from the terrestrial world, and in bringing all classes of the population to their altars for every conceivable coun- sel and assistance, they debauched their own influence ; and this, with the dubious nature of many of the responses, set the pace for their decline. The ques- tions propounded to the oracles and found on tablets uncovered from the ruins of Delphi reveal the kind THE ANCIENT ORACLES 33 of guidance sought by worshippers and seekers after supernatural help. Plutarch, who lived at the end of the first century under the Emperor Trajan, wrote an essay on the " Cessation of the Oracles," in which he remarked this unpleasant characteristic of their performances. In conversation with some friends on the question of why the oracles had disappeared, he puts into the mouth of Didymus Planetiades, the Cynic, the following vigorous interruption of their dialogue. " Ho, ho ! A difficult problem, truly, one demand- ing much investigation, is what you come to bring us ; for it were a wonder, when so much wickedness is spread abroad, if not merely Modesty and Shame (as Hesiod said of old) should have abandoned man- kind, but if the divine Providence should not have packed up its oracles out of every quarter, and taken his departure! On the contrary, I propose to you to inquire how it was that oracles did not come to an end long ago, and why Hercules did not for a second time (or else some other of the gods) steal away the Tripod, all bewrayed as it was with filthy and impious questions that people propound to the deity; while some make trial of his cleverness, as though he were a sophist, others tease him with ques- tions about treasure-troves, successions to property, and illegal marriages; so that P3rthagoras is most signally confuted in saying that men are then at their best when they are going to worship the gods : in such way, those very thoughts and passions of the soul, which it were but decent to disclaim and to hide, if one's elder should be present, these same thoughts M ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH do they carrj naked and fully exposed into the pres- ence of the gods." But it was the rise and progress of intellectual cul- ture represented by philosophy that did more to cause the decline of the oracles than all other influ- ences. Some have tried to trace it to the decline in population, and Plutarch considered this. But he called attention to the fact that the oracles were still proportioned to population, but that they were not flourishing as they had been in the earlier period. No doubt Christianity and its attitude toward demo- niac possession and alleged communications with the dead had exercised a powerful influence in this direc- tion. If the philosophic movement and its scientific spirit as represented in Aristotle had taken up the subject instead of disparaging it, the oracles might have been longer in perishing, assuming that any- thing of scientific interest would have been found. But it was the cautious and sceptical attitude of philosophy that helped to cause their disappearance. The Greek reflective mind saw in the cosmos a fixed order, and in the reaction against polytheism, though it accepted a monotheistic view in the person of some of its best men, it placed, usually back of Jupiter, an agency which subjected to itself the will of all the gods. This was Fate, a name for an impersonal law and order which bound even the powers of the divine to its decrees. It was only a way of deifying Nature, or saying that personality had no place in its ultimate regulation. In the reign of polytheism men conceived the cosmic order as more or less capricious, at least, in some of its aspects. Whatever they ascribed to THE ANCIENT ORACLES 35 fate, they believed in the influence of the gods in the affairs of men, and sought to obtain their aid and interference through the oracles. They placed little or no reliance upon their own powers, but sought in every emergency the interposition of the divine. The Greek lived ever in the consciousness of ex- ternal restraints upon his liberty. He pined for free- dom, natural and political, and looked upon nature as he looked upon a tyrant; he sought to appease its anger by sacrifices, when he was religious, and either taught Stoicism or resigned himself to despair or a hopeless fate, when he was not religious. But before he had reached this condition in his civiliza- tion, and just as the rising scepticism was beginning to dissolve ancient institutions, a new philosophy arose which, if it did not save Greece, remained for a later age, and set up a rival influence to the ora- cles that dispensed with their services to man. It was the idealistic movement initiated by Socrates and de- veloped by Plato and Aristotle. Previous speculation had been cosmological or cosmocentric ; that is, seek- ing the causes and meaning of things from without, and presenting no opportunities for man to effect anything except by obedience to external powers. Man's chief virtues were not self -initiative and self- reliance, but obedience and submission. His politics taught him the same duties. The external world ruled his destiny and actions, and, if fortune did not put happiness in his way by accident, he could only mourn his ill luck and endure his sufferings. Socrates turned man's reflections upon himself. He made philosophy anthropocentric instead of cosmocentric, and inspired 36 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the individual with self-reliance and self-confidence. The world was to be seen from within and not from without. What man obtained he won by his own efforts, it may be, against the adverse fortune of nature itself. He might be more than a Stoic. He might subject nature to himself instead of being its slave. He was to find his salvation from within and not from without. He must rely upon himself and not upon the gods. It took many centuries, of course, for this implication to work itself out into practical life and ideals, but it was there in the inception of the Socratic doctrine, and, when this independence of external nature united its tendencies with science and art in the domination of the human mind and taste, it dispensed with the need of oracles for seeking the aid of unseen forces. Man studied the laws of nature, and could regulate his own life and make his own predictions. Oracles, sacrifices, and religious rites were not necessary. Every man could be his own oracle, if he would but have knowledge. " Even while Polygnotus," says Mr. Myers again, " was painting the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi, a man was talking in the Athenian market-place, from whose powerful individuality, the most impress- ive which Greece had ever known, were destined to flow streams of influence which should transform every department of belief and thought. In tracing the history of the oracles we shall feel the influence of Socrates mainly in two directions: in his asser- tion of a personal and spiritual relation between man and the unseen world, an oracle not without us but within, and in his origination of the idea of science, THE ANCIENT ORACLES S7 of a habit of mind which should refuse to accept any explanation of phenomena which failed to confer the power of predicting those phenomena or producing them anew. We shall find that, instead of the old acceptance of the responses as heaven-sent mysteries, and the old demands for prophetic knowledge or for guidance in the affairs of Hfe, men are more and more concerned with the questions : How can oracles be practically produced? and what relation between God and man do they imply? But first of all, the oracle which concerned Socrates himself, which de- clared him to be the wisest of mankind, is certainly one of the most noticeable ever uttered at Delphi. The fact that the man on whom the god had bestowed this extreme laudation, a laudation paralleled only by the mythical words addressed to Lycurgus, should a few years afterward have been put to death for impiety, is surely one of deeper significance than has often been observed. It forms an overt and impress- ive instance of that divergence between the law and the prophets, between the letter and the spirit, which is sure to occur in the history of all religions, and on the manner of whose settlement the destiny of each religion in turn depends. In this case the conditions of the conflict are striking and unusual. Socrates is accused of failing to honor the gods of the State, and of introducing new gods under the name of demons, or spirits, as we must translate the word, since the title of demon has acquired in the mouths of the Fathers a bad signification. He replies that he does honor the gods of the State as he understands 68 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH them, and that the spirit that speaks with him is an agency which he cannot disavow." An " external " voice guided Socrates and served him as a personal oracle, but it did not tell him what he should do. The utmost it did was to warn him in critical situations as to what he should not do. The actions that were to make up his natural hfe were left to his own judgment, and the communication with unseen forces limited to restraints upon him in necessary and important crises. This power he ob- tained by knowledge of himself and things, the old oracles having been used as a corrective of ignorance. When Socrates went to consult the oracle of Delphi to test its character, that shrewd student of human nature answered in most pertinent language, " Know thj^self," and in that counsel signed its own death- warrant. So apt to the hfe and opinions of Socrates was this oracular response, that one would wish to believe it mythical, but it seems to have been histori- cal, and it reflects the intelligence of that agency which had governed the destiny of Greece for so many centuries. Had it foreseen the consequence of its own response, it would either have withheld its advice or joined with applause in the movement which brought man into a better knowledge of the laws of nature and his relation to it with the independence which his knowledge of himself brought with it. In any case, the scientific spirit emancipated man from the fear of the gods, which had so long held him in bondage. This fear and consciousness of their capri- ciousness was such a nightmare to Epicurus and Lucretius that they bent all their energies to put THE ANCIENT ORACLES 39 them out of all providential relations to man and the world; but they offered no philosophy which could supply man with an ideal or confidence in him- self for struggle and achievement, and much less a divine with which each man might commune without consulting the oracles. J CHAPTER III CRYSTAL vision: HISTORY Crystal gazing, as it is called, is perhaps nearly as old as the consultation of oracles, and was per- haps as often sought as other agencies to obtain supposed knowledge of the unseen, present, past, or future. But of this in its place. For the present we must know what crystal gazing is. Crystal gazing is the simple act of looking into a crystal, glass of water, polished stone or wood, or other surface capable of reflecting light, with the consequence that various types of apparitions or hal- lucinations are produced. Sometimes an analogous phenomenon is produced by holding a shell to the ear, when auditory hallucinations occur. But most frequently the phenomena are visual effects of look- ing into a crystal, a mirror, or polished surface. What they are and what they mean will be the subject of later reflection. They are, however, phenomena of a wholly unpredictable character and apparently irrelevant to the cause which produces them. We have no a priori reason to expect that looking at a polished surface will produce such eff'ects, and, if we had, we are not able to predetermine what those effects will be. They are altogether capricious and without suggestiveness, as yet, of the real agency that gives rise to them. All that we know is that for thou- 40 CRYSTAL VISION: HISTORY 41 sands of years peculiarly constituted persons have had the power to produce hallucinations of a certain kind in themselves by gazing into crystals. For the history of crystal gazing I shall have to depend almost wholly upon the material collected by Miss Goodrich-Freer, in her article in the Proceedmgs of the Society for Psychical Research, and much of it shall be told in her own woisds. Some of the mate- rial can be found in Mr. Myers' Human Personality and Its Swrvwal of Bodily Death. Its history, as I have remarked, is very old. The practice of it in some form was known three thousand years ago, and traces of it are found in Assyria, Greece, Rome, China, Japan, India, and possibly in some of the South Sea Islands. It appeared in the middle ages and reached its highest development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, " finding its exponents among the learned physicians and mathe- maticians of the Courts of Elizabeth, the Italian princes, the Regent Catherine de Medici, and the Emperors Maximilian and Rudolph." It was used in these periods as an art of divination, one among the other forms of ascertaining what was not nor- mally revealed or known. " Among the Greeks," says Miss Goodrich-Freer, " various methods of divination by reflections on glass or water were used. " 1. Hydromancy. This was practised chiefly at Patras, a city on the seacoast of Achaia, where was a temple dedicated to Demeter. Before the temple was a fountain in which were delivered oracles, very famous for the truth of their predictions. These 42 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH were not given on every account, but concerned only the events of diseases. The manner of consulting was this : they let down a mirror by a small cord into the fountain, so that the lower edge might just touch the surface of the water, but not be covered by it; this done, they offered incense and prayers to the goddess, then looked upon tlie mirror, and from vari- ous figures and images represented in it made con- jectures concerning the patient. " 2. Lecanomancy, divination by a bowl contain- ing water or a mixture of oil and wine. The Scholi- ast upon Lycophron believes this method to have been practised by Ulysses, and to have given occasion to the stories of his consultation with the ghost of Tiresias. " 3. Catoptromancy, in which mirrors were used without water. Sometimes it was performed in a vessel of water, the middle part of which was called gaster, and then the divination termed Gastromancy. " 4. Gastromancy. Glass vessels were used filled with clear water, and surrounded by torches. A demon was invoked, and a boy appointed to obser\^e whatever appearances arose by the demon's action upon the water. " 5. Onychomancy, * performed by the nails of an unpolluted boy, covered with oil and soot, which they turned to the sun, the reflection of whose rays were believed to represent, by certain images, the things they had a mind to be satisfied about.' " 6. Crystallomancy, ' performed by polished and enchanted crystals, in which future events were sig- nified by certain marks and figures.' '* CRYSTAL VISION: HISTORY 43 We can well understand from such performances in those ages what incidents would make the scientific mind chary of an interest in oracles. In India mir- rors were used, and in some instances castor oil was poured into the hands of a child, who was expected to see visions of spirits and demons. In Polynesia, a hole was dug in the ground and it was filled with water, and the priest looked into this to discover the authors of thefts. Some Indians make their patients gaze into the water, in which they are supposed to see pictures of the food or medicine good for them. Among the Apaches the crystal was used to discover stolen property. Whether Joseph's cup was used for divination, as it was used by South Sea Islanders, is not assured, but we may suspect that Urim and Thummim was the result of practice in crystal vision. This suspicion is supported by the reference in the Persian poets to the " Cup of Giamschid, in which could be seen the whole world and all the things which were doing in it." Among the Romans Varro " tells a story of a child who was consulted as to the war of Mithridates, and children, we learn, were consulted by Fabius. It is also said that a child foresaw, by reading in a mirror, the issue of the contest between Severus and Tullius Crispinus, and revealed the prophecy to Di- dius Julianus, by whom the oracle was consulted." Casaubon tells a story of a monk putting a vase of water in the hands of a man who came to him, and the latter saw visions as a consequence. The Specu- larii were evidently named from their habit of inquir- ing into the future by the aid of a mirror, and seem 44 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH to have had a large following in the middle ages. Thomas Aquinas mentions the phenomenon and at- tributes it to the Devil, but it continued down to the sixteenth century in spite of its condemnation. In the struggle between Francis I and Charles V the action of the French was said to have been influenced by a magician discovering in the reflections of a mir- ror the progress of events in Milan. Pico Mirandola, though a foe to astrology, admitted the fact of crys- tal visions. Aubrey refers to the practice in Italy, and the Earl of Denbigh mentions an observation of it in Venice. Bodin, an eminent lawyer in Tou- louse, refers to it. But it was John Dee who experimented and wrote most voluminously on crystallomancy. He was born in London in 1527, became a Fellow of Trinity Col- lege, Cambridge, and a mathematician of some repute. Some of his writing on Euclid, the reform of the cal- endar, and other matters are still extant. He was somewhat favored by Queen EHzabeth, and was ap- pointed Chancellor of St. Paul's, but on the accession of James I he fell under suspicion and retired. He died in 1608. He experimented in crystal vision with a boy named Kelly, about whom little is known except that he had a criminal character. This fact throws doubt upon the genuineness of the visions, which purported to represent in many cases discarnate spirits, though none were ever identified. It does not matter, how- ever, whether the boy could be trusted or not, as the history of the art does not involve the genuineness of any of its phenomena, but the fact of its practice. CRYSTAL VISION: HISTORY 45 It is, of course, probable that the very abnormal character of the boy was favorable to the production of crystal hallucinations, and we should have no dif- ficulty in supposing their genuineness, though we had no criterion to distinguish between imagination and hallucination, on the one hand, and lying and hallu- cination on the other. There are some incidents re- ported in Dee's account of the experiment that would class the phenomena with the tricks of a " naughty boy." Some interesting facts and illustrations of crystal gazing are recorded by Boissard, in which we have the usual elements, — the mirror, incantations, and child seer; and one of the instances given is note- worthy as an example of clairvoyance, rather than of the spiritualistic flavor of the Dee stories. " A man having committed murder is fleeing from his country. On the way he goes to a magician for news of his wife. Incantations are performed, a child is called, and, looking in a mirror, describes a room, a lady, the details of her dress. She is flattening something in her palm, and laughs and talks with a young man who sits by. " The husband recognizes his wife, and the room she occupies, but not the young man, and, seized with jealousy, returns at the risk of his life to a village near home, whence he sends a messenger to his wife desiring an interview. The lady arrives, much re- joiced at the unexpected meeting, and, on being ques- tioned, gives an account of the scene described, which agrees in every particular, even as to the dress she was wearing at the time. The mysterious young man 46 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH turns out to be the husband's brother, for whom she was preparing a plaster which she flattened between her hands." Revelation Hke this might have its uses in watch- ing the integrity of the family, but why did so capri- cious an informer as the crystal hit upon this rele- vant incident and not betray the murderer? The trouble is that the incident is reported from an age and possibly by persons whose judgment cannot be trusted. We may have only the opinions of the wit- ness and not the exact facts in the case. But true or false, the incident probably reports truthfully enough the habits of the age, and that suffices to show the persistence of the phenomena under review. Another story reports a like piece of detective work. " De I'Ancre gives a somewhat similar story of a jealous husband, to whom a magician, reading in a glass, describes a scene which induces him to return home at once, to find that his wife had broken her arm, which had been set by a surgeon monk, the sight of whom had caused so much unnecessary anxi- ety." Ben Jonson mentions the art, and a Mr. Comp- ton, said to have been a physician of some note, proved to a patient that he had power to descry in the crystal things going on at a distance, if the report of his experiment can be accepted. A later and, per- haps, more authentic example of crystal gazing is given by Saint Simon (1675-1755) in his Memoirs. He states that a crystal gazer told the Duke of Or- leans of the fate of the princes through whose death he obtained the position of Regent of France. The vision was by a young girl and by means of a glass CRYSTAL VISION: HISTORY 47 of water. Mrs. De Morgan, wife of Professor De Morgan, the logician, at Cambridge University, in comparatively recent times, reports her knowledge of the phenomena. She remarked that in some cases it produced something like a hypnotic condition. This apparently, however, is not general. In more recent times attention has been called to its occurrence in modem Egypt, and there was some discussion of it in the now extinct serial called the Zoisty with indications that the phenomena created some excitement in Lancashire about the middle of the last century (1850). " An interesting experi- ment, made in 1869, has recently been recorded by Mr. Dawson Rogers (Light, March 16, 1889). He relates that he put a crystal into the hands of a lady, to whom its use was quite unknown, who, after gazing into it a short time, minutely described a scene, in which a lecturer, apparently an Englishman, was addressing an audience, while behind a chair stood the spirit of a North American Indian, who seemed, to some extent, to inspire his discourse. Some months later the lady was by chance introduced to the United States consul at Trebizond, whom she recognized as the subject of her vision, and who believed it to refer to some occasion when he had given an address in that town. He also stated that other Spiritualist seers had given similar descriptions of the Indian spirit." This last incident is one that purports to have some authenticity and intimation of supernormal knowl- edge, just as do many of the historical and tradi- tional instances. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have had any such record as is necessary to impress 48 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the scientific mind, since it waited for twenty years to get on paper, and memory may have distorted the facts beyond recognition. But this is no place to examine its credentials, as every scientific man can do that for himself. I am interested in its recent character and the fairly authentic report of the inci- dent as a whole, even though the important details should prove untrustworthy. True or false, it rep- resents well enough the nature of these reputed phe- nomena from the earliest times, and if it should be acceptable as containing actual clairvoyant knowl- edge, though it is not evidentially valuable, it would render credible some of the marvellous stories of an- tiquity, whose truth need not be accepted as told us to admit their genuineness as psychological facts, though distorted by time and misinterpretation. I doubt not that further inquiries by careful stu- dents would unearth much more than has come to the attention of the few whom I have here quoted, as such stories as have survived the fate of the " super- natural " in the struggle with scientific scepticism are only surface indications of what was perhaps much more plentiful than we now know. At any rate, we have given sufficient evidence that the phenomena of crystal visions are older and more numerous than the average man would even suspect, and that suf- fices to show that any claims now made for their reality and scientific interest are not to be contemned on the ground that they are illusory claims. They seem to have a history and lineage quite as important as any of the beliefs that were associated with their occurrence. What they mean we may not know, but CRYSTAL VISION: HISTORY 49 this is no reason for not trying to ascertain it. We should never have known anything about physiology or psychology, if we had not studied their residual phenomena. CHAPTER IV CRYSTAL gazing: EXPERIMENTS The present known facts of crystal vision are no less like a Walpurgis night's dream than are those which tradition has brought down to us, though we have recorded them in a much more scientific spirit, in so far as there has been any opportunity for it. The great defect of all the work of antiquity is that it reported so little and recorded less. The properly scientific spirit did not exist until very recent times. This spirit concerns itself with facts regardless of theoretical explanations and consequences. It does not first determine the value and meaning of a fact, and then save it, but saves it with or without any per- ceived importance. Antiquity had no such morals. Where it interested itself in exceptional facts at all, it was the " supernatural " that induced the preserva- tion of them and only such as seemed to confirm that belief. The philosophic mind, perhaps in fear of dis- turbing the stability of its theories, would not notice any of them, significant or unsignificant. Ancient philosophy ignored all it could not explain consist- ently with its superficial theories, and hence all excep- tional and residual phenomena escaped its alembic. The same spirit is true of certain schools to-day. They cannot bear the light of facts which disturb the course of their dreams. They will accept only one will-o'-the-wisp, and that is the " natural." But 60 CRYSTAL GAZING: EXPERIMENTS 51 science will have the facts and adjusts its theories to them, and records these facts conscientiously, regard- less of its wishes, and searching for what it does not obtain. The consequence of this difference between ancient and modem times is that we have a more accurate knowledge of what actually occurs. All that comes to us of ancient times consists of the facts, real or supposed, which were of special interest or were supposed to be remarkable. The facts which might have thrown Hght upon the whole mass of phenomena were treated as negligible, and we have for modern perusal a uniform report of miraculous events which are as incredible as most of ancient lore steeped in mysticism. And knowing, too, that antiquity never knew how to report facts, but only theories and inter- pretations, we might even discount their commonplace events. All that comes to us is but an evidence of a resemblance between the past and the present in their general character, and it is left to us to deter- mine the real nature of the past by what we can ascer- tain of the present. In recent years, and especially since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, the interest in such phenomena has so increased that a fair record of the facts can be obtained wherever there is any realization of their importance. But not many have yet experimented with them. The consequence is that all explanations of them are still held in abeyance until we know more about the conditions of their oc- currence and the characteristics that determine them. By making such records as have been made, and with- out discriminating, as former ages did, between those 52 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH that had a practical or supernormal and those which had no such importance, we have found that many of them are traceable like many other phenomena to subconscious mental activities and memories thus brought to the surface. It is this fact which gives them a scientific interest not observed by the ancients, and at the same time connects them with the known phenomena of mind. I shall have more to say of this point as the examination of them proceeds. I merely call attention to the circumstance as an evi- dence of the value attaching to scientific observation and records of all that occurs, and not merely the more striking facts which superficially indicate super- normal events. The history and associations of crystal gazing show a belief that its phenomena are of the " supernat- ural," or what psychic research has preferred to call the supernormal, to distinguish merely that the facts are not explicable in the ordinary way. But in what is to be said of them here there is to be no implica- tion whatever that they are even supernormal. We shall find that many of the phenomena are not that in any respect, however curious or inexplicable they may be. The appearance of their supernormal, or even " supernatural," character in past history was due entirely to the neglect of those instances which were resurrected memories of the seer or crystal gazer. We have learned to observe these as carefully as we do the more inexplicable instances, and the result is a better articulation of the facts with our existing knowledge. In this chapter I shall largely confine myself to CRYSTAL GAZING: EXPERIMENTS 53 the quotation of instances with such comments as will make their general character clear. It will not be easy to adopt any hard and fast classification of them, as the different types often interpenetrate. But there are certain classes of them that are fairly distinct. They are such as are evidently the resurrection of past experiences, whether recognized or not, such as are the product of mere fancy or imagination, and such as purport to have some supernormal character- istics, whether telepathic, clairvoyant, or apparently messages from the discarnate. I shall endeavor to select the instances with this general classification in mind, though there may be some instances in one or the other of these types that do not have their real nature assuredly ascertained. I shall select first my own experiments with a lady whose name I have to conceal. She is the wife of an orthodox clergyman on whom I reported to the Society for Psychical Re- search some years ago. I had received from her a narrative of many coincidental experiences, some of them at least apparently supernormal, and it occurred to me that I should try crystal gazing with her. She consented and made notes of exactly what she saw. I give the list in full, without any comments as to their character until they have been given. They occurred in 1895 on dates mentioned in the record. I shall call the lady Mrs. D. 1. Resurrected Memories February 12th 1. An iceberg floating in the water. 2. A sunset view, with the observer looking over r. '64 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH a hill upon a bank of clouds surrounding the setting sun. 3. A human head lying on a pillow and with the mouth wide open. 4. The face of Mrs. D.'s mother. 5. A woman and child lying in bed with face un- covered and bedclothes pulled up to the neck. 6. An interesting and complicated scene compris- ing a house resembling one in which a relative of Mrs. D. lived and which was partly concealed by a ledge of cliff rocks that were not connected with this relative's house; one gable end of the house seemed to have fallen in or to have been cut open, and vari- ous people, including men, women, and children, were coming out through this opening and returning into it. To the left of the house were two tall objects like posts. No faces were recognized in the vision of the people. 7. The entrance to a cemetery, which resembled the cemetery known by Mrs. D. at her old home in Ohio. But the appearance of it, beyond the gate and wall with some of the tombstones and monuments, rep- resented it as different from what it was when Mrs. D. knew it. 8. A person kneeling before a covered bier, and a face looking over the bier toward the one kneeling before it. 9. A face with a large nose and thin sunken lips. MarcTi 20th 10. The face of a Mr. X., who had been Mrs. D.'s pastor in P , Ohio, and whom Mrs. D. had not CRYSTAL GAZING: EXPERIMENTS 55 seen for fifteen years until within two or three years of date of vision, and then had frequently seen him since. But he appeared as he had been known in Ohio. When the face appeared, the eyes were closed, the mouth open, and the teeth gnashing. The vision was not very clear at first, but when it developed into distinctness Mrs. D. involuntarily exclaimed : " Why, Mr. X." But when the crystal was turned the face vanished quickly and other unrecognized faces took its place. Before Mr. X.'s face appeared, however, there was a shght picture of a cemetery which could be described only as an indistinct dream. April 6th 11. A lady playing a piano. 12. A lady holding an infant, and a child near by looking at the infant. 13. A street with pavement and houses, and a child knocking at a white door. 14. A lady standing at the left of an open trunk, holding up the lid with the right hand and stooping over to take something with the left hand. The posi- tion seemed very unusual to Mrs. D. 15. A little boy holding a baby in his arms. 16. A child lying asleep on a bed. 17. A man lying on a bed with a diamond stud in his shirt bosom, and his head concealed from view by the headboard. Behind the bed stood a mirror or screen, and on the wall hung a picture. 18. A man propped up in bed by a pillow and try- ing to write. 56 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH April 8th 19. A landscape representing a field, and cow-path entering under a pair of bars into another field, with trees, bushes, and stones on the right side of the bars. 20. A most interesting instance of a room with tiling on the floors and on one of the walls. The other wall was in shadow, apparently caused by streaming sunlight passing through a colored glass window deeply set in the wall near the comer of the room. Into this stream of light suddenly flew a dove. The scene was a very brilHant one and re- sembled a fine painting of a corner of a mediaeval castle or church. The tiling on the wall had cross marks in the pieces. SI. An abrupt, rocky, and dark cliffy, somewhat resembling an island, with clefts at the left hand; through these the sun shone upon some water and in the face of a man who was in the act of rising from his lying posture. 22. The head and face of a man wearing a bushy beard and hair. 23. A bridge across a moat or canal with shipping and houses beyond, such as are often seen in large cities. As the visions did not represent any evidence of the supernormal and as Mrs. D. experienced a strong tendency to go into a sleep or trance when she looked into the crystal she resolved to discontinue the ex- periments. The mere description of the incidents suffices to suggest the origin of the visions, which were as clear as reahty. On being questioned at the CRYSTAL GAZING: EXPERIMENTS 57 time Mrs. D. could not recall experiences that would account for any of the instances as resurrected memo- ries, except those which explain themselves as that. It is apparent that some of them are mosaics of dif- ferent experiences which never occurred as wholes according to the representation of the crystal. It appears that the visions were spontaneous fabrica- tions of the subconscious action of the mind, based upon imperfectly reproduced memories. That this is the probable explanation is apparent in the most interesting one of all of them, namely, the twentieth, that of the church, sunlight, and dove. Mrs. D. could remember no picture that would sug- gest it and had not been in any gallery where a simi- lar picture might be seen. I have seen in a Euro- pean gallery one quite resembling it, except in the incident of the dove flying in the sunbeams. When Mrs. D. indicated that she could recall no picture like it, Mr. D. spoke up and said that they had a Bible, and had had it for a long time, on which was just such a picture, a dove in rays of light. Mrs. D. then recalled the book, but could not remember that she had noticed or thought of the picture. But granting this source of one or two features in the vision there were those not suggested by the picture on the Bible, and hence we have indications of a mosaic either of other forgotten memories or of fab- ricated scenes, such as the imagination will produce in dreams. Two other visions have a coincidental interest, that referring to the cemetery in Ohio, No. 7, and that referring to a man propped up in bed and trying ....^-.» ■■■..,., -^^.««^^.>..w-^ TELEPATHY 113 With one exception I have carefully avoided the selection of incidents which represented a dream or death coincidence, because I did not wish to complicate the cases with any implication of a relation to de- ceased persons and unconscious mental conditions. I have tried to limit the instances to the waking state, with the exception mentioned. The advantage of this is that we exclude the natural interpretation which the spiritualist might give to the phenomena, though dream coincidences might not superficially suggest that view. But it is surprising to observe how many of the coincidences which I might have quoted were connected with the death of a friend or acquaintance about the time of the experience suggesting the fact. I shall have to recur to this again, as it suffices for the present to have a set of well-accredited coinci- dences which do not suggest the spiritistic interpre- tation and so involve us in less difficulty than this larger theory. The difficulty, however, may be less only because of the inveterate prejudice against the possibility of surviving identity and consciousness. Let this be as it may, the mental attitude of men is more favorable to coincidences that do not imply the existence of a soul. The prevalence of materialistic views makes many suppose that such coincidences may be explicable by " natural " means, and others, no matter how striking, become incredible just because they apparently contradict the materialistic theory. Hence it is well to have instances which do not invite any more objections than are necessary, and such as I have quoted, if numerous enough, would demand some explanation, if nothing more than chance guess- 114 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ing or similar agencies. The few instances given are certainly not enough to afford anything like proof for telepathy, and must be supplemented by a large number of experiments to make them more than curi- ous facts suggesting inquiry. These spontaneous coincidences are more numerous, but some of them are too long to quote, and most of them belong to the class of apparitions and dreams. Such as are quoted, however, suffice to indicate the occurrence of incidents which make experimental investigation im- perative to decide whether phenomena suggesting a telepathic explanation may be discoverable beyond merely spontaneous occurrences. To these I now turn. 3. Experimental Phenomena Whatever it was that suggested telepathy as an explanation of certain phenomena, it was imperative that the hypothesis should be tested by experiment. This was undertaken, often by individuals moved, as it were, by the condition of public opinion and often by scientific men who were bent on critical methods. In the instances of coincidence associated with experi- ment, I shall quote first a lay case which has the attestation of a physician in good standing, and vouched for by the Journal above quoted. The lady whose testimony he supports was one of his patients, and many of the coincidences concerned himself and his action, so that he can attest them. The lady kept a journal of her experiments and their coincidences. Some of the instances were spontaneous, and one of these latter coincided with the death of a relative. TELEPATHY 115 But I shall quote only those instances which were experimental. Her physician says that her state- ments can be trusted. " Jan. 21st. I willed very hard indeed that Mr. Duke (physician) should come here before twelve o'clock, just to prove if I could bring him. He came just before the time. " Jan 24th. This morning I was thinking of Mrs. T. B., and said how I should like her to come in ; I wanted to speak to her. This was 11.30 a. m., and in the afternoon she came, and I told her I was think- ing of her in the morning, and she said she made up her mind to come while she was cleaning her kitchen in the morning after 11 a. m. " Jan. 26th. I am feeHng Mr. Duke will call. He did, before E. had finished dusting the room. I knew he would. To-night a rap came at the front door. I felt it was a poor woman named M., and I told Mr. S. (husband) it was, and I would not see her, and it was her. I had no reason for thinking it was her, only I felt it. " Jan. 31st. I felt Mr. Duke would come this morning, but he did not. " Feb. 1st. Mr. Duke came. I knew he was com- ing quite well, and hurried E. to get my room done. He said he wanted to come yesterday (Jan. 31st), but was too busy, he could not bring it in. " Feb. 4th. I was again talking about the B.'s in C. street, and they came in to see me. " Feb. 5th. Mrs. Ph. is not so well again. I shall hear from her to-morrow. " Feb. 6th. I have this morning received my note 116 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH from Mrs. Ph. I feel Mr. Duke will come this morn- ing. Twelve o'clock, he has just gone." The record was kept for about a year, and in all numbers about 160 such coincidences. Any one of them might be explicable by chance, but, without essaying to urge dogmatically any other interpreta- tion, I think most people would agree that they ap- parently exclude chance very effectively. Indeed, many would prefer to believe lying to maintaining chance, and to the extent to which they would try to discredit the phenomena in this way they would admit that chance coincidence did not explain them. As experiments, however, they are too closely asso- ciated with spontaneous incidents to give them any but a suggestive force. A more striking set of ex- periments were by a man whom the chief men in the Society's Committee considered not only trustworthy, but also a careful experimenter. I refer to the case of Rev. P. H. Newnham and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Newnham experimented with the planchette. Mrs. Newnham sat with this instrument to write out the answers to questions sent to her, in most instances, telepathically from Mr. Newnham. Mr. Newnham simply thought of the question he wanted answered, and Mrs. Newnham, not knowing what the questions were, wrote the answers automat- ically. I give the record made on the occasion, the questions and answers being as explained. All ques- tions in what I quote were telepathically sent. " February 18th. Q. Who are you that writes, and has told all that you know.f^ A. Wife. "n TELEPATHY 117 " Q. But does no one tell wife what to write? If so, who? A. Spirit. " Q. Whose spirit? A. Wife's brain. " Q. But how does wife's brain know [Masonic] secrets? A. Wife's spirit unconsciously guides. " Q. But how does wife's spirit know things it has never been told? A. No external influence. " Q. But by what internal influence does it know [Masonic] secrets? A. You cannot know. " March 15th. Q. Who then makes impressions on her? A. Many strange things. " Q. What sort of strange things? A. Things beyond your knowledge. " Q. Do, then, things beyond our knowledge make impressions upon wife? A. Influences which no man understands or knows. " Q. Are these influences which we cannot under- stand external to wife? A. External — invisible. " Q. Does a spirit, or do spirits, exercise those influences? A. No, never (written very large and emphatically). " Q. Then from whom, or from whence, do the external influences come ? A. Yes ; you will never know. " Q. What do you mean by writing ' yes ' in the last answer? A. That I really meant never. " March 19th. Q. By what means are [Masonic] secrets conveyed to wife's brain? A. What you call mesmeric influence. " Q. What do you mean by ' what you call ' ? What do yoiL call it. A. Electro-biology. " Q. By whom, or by what, is the electro-biologic 118 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH force set in motion? A. I told you you could not know more than you did. " Q. Can wife answer a question the reply to which I do not know? A. Why do you try to make me say what I won't? " Q. Simply because I desire knowledge. Why will not you tell? A. Wife could tell if some one else, with a very strong will, in the room knew. " March 26th. Q. Why are you not always influ- enced by what I think? A. Wife knows sometimes what you think. " Q. How does wife know it? A. When her brain is excited and has not been tried before. " Q. By what means are my thoughts conveyed to her brain? A. Electro-biology. " Q. What is electro-biology ? A. No one knows. " Q. But do not you know? A. No. Wife does not know. " Q. What makes you always call her wife? A. You always think of wife, " Q. But I never call her wife. Why do you? A. I am nothing without wife. " Q. That is no answer. Why do you call her so? A. Because she is all a wife." The number of perfectly clear coincidences in this series is remarkable and those which are not clear are relevant, and if they do not exactly answer the tele- pathically put question, they make an impressive case for the general appreciation of the question, though the answers may be enigmatic. But the sustained conversation carried on in this telepathic manner, with its pertinent responses even when not verifiable, intel- TELEPATHY 119 ligent, or true, is a most interesting series of coin- cidences, however we explain them. From a long report by Professor Barrett, of Dub- lin, I select the following three incidents which repre- sent experiments made to exclude muscle reading. " 1. Miss B., seated at a table, with her eyes ban- daged, and a pencil in her hand. I stood behind her ; no word was spoken. I took my spectacles and held them in my hand ; she wrote ' Spectacles ' ; then my dog-whistle ; after this a key ; then a pencil ; all these she wrote down correctly. " 2. The same young lady, M. B., seated at a table with her eyes bandaged, pencil in hand. Her uncle, standing about twelve feet distant, asked, ' What word am I thinking of .? M. B. wrote ' Homo.' This was correct. " My daughter, who had recently returned from a visit to her brother at his vicarage, asked M. B. (who was again seated with eyes bandaged, and pencil in hand), ' Who preached at my brother's church last Sunday evening? the answer to the question being known to my daughter only. ]M. B. wrote the first six letters of the name, viz., ' Westmo — ' and then said, ' I feel no more influence.' My daughter said, ' Lean your head against me.' M. B. did so, and then wrote the rest of the name, making it quite right — ' West- more.' " Mr. Edmund Gurney and Mr. Frederic W. H. Myers tried some interesting experiments with a sub- ject in which the agent held the hand of the percip- ient. This condition admits of the general objection from muscle reading, conscious or unconscious, 120 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH though it will be hard to explain the successes and partial failures by this theory. They were assured that there was no dishonesty in fact, though the con- ditions permitted trickery of some kind, and the facts are not given as conclusive proof. The first experi- ments consisted of words or names thought of by the agent and trials by the percipient to obtain them telepathically. The following are the records, and the most interesting part of them is the half successes. WITH CONTACT Name chosen Answer Barnard. Harlan d, Barnard. Bellairs. Humphreys, Ben Nevis, Be- naris. Johnson. Jobson, Johnson. Regent Street. Rembrant Steeth, Regent St Queen Anne. Queechy, Queen. Wissenschaft. Wissie, Wissenaft. WITHOUT CONTACT Name Chosen Answer Hobhouse. Hunter. Black. Drake, Blake. The agent was ignorant of German and had to mentally represent the word Wissenschaft. The best type of experiment for testing telepathy is the drawing of diagrams or figures, and these should be of that character which will exclude guess- ing altogether. The simple geometrical figure will permit of many successful guesses, and hence either unlikely figures should be selected or the likely figures must have associated characteristics which are not TELEPATHY 121 familiarly connected with them. Here is a record of some experiments. A triangle was drawn, base downwards, and cross lines within it. From the apex extending upwards was a straight line. The description given by the percipient was : " A triangle, with apex downwards, and some loose lines." The next figure was a triangle, base downwards, straight Kne extending upwards from apex, and a circle with the circumference passing through the comers of the triangle. In other words, it was the same figure as before with the addition of the circle as indicated. The description by the percipient was : " Triangle in a circle, and straight line pointing downwards" Noticing that the percipient saw the figures upside down instead of as drawn, they drew a human head upside down, with a pipe in the mouth, and two straight lines drawn upward and a Hne across their top. The percipient's description of this was : ' I see a sort of circle ; a streak, with a lump at the top ; an ' Aunt Sally ' sort of thing." The head of the figure was quite round and lumpy. Again he seemed to see the figure inverted. There were several other experiments involving more complicated figures which are more difficult to describe, and to give a clear idea of which would require a reproduction of the drawings. The success in them was of the same kind. There are interesting summaries of the earlier experiments by Mr. Gumey and Mr. Myers, Pro- fessor Barrett, and Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick. 1£2 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH In Professor Barrett's, of thirty -three objects chosen to think of, twenty-five were guessed rightly ; of thirty-five names, twenty-six were guessed rightly, and of seven cards chosen, seven were guessed rightly. In all, seventy-five experiments resulted in fifty-eight correct hits. This is more than seventy-seven per cent, correct answers, which is certainly a very high per- centage, especially considering that the chances of success were very slight. In cards they were one to seven, but in names and objects they were almost indeterminate. In Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick's experiments the results were: Twenty-three trials, with six answers right the first time and six the second guess. Count- ing only the correct answers for the first guess, the percentage was one in three and three-fourths or twenty-six per cent, against one chance in fifty-two, or about two per cent., as cards were used. Pro- fessor Balfour Stewart reports a table much better than this. He experimented with numbers between ten and one hundred, with ob j ects, and names, as well as cards. Things No. of No. right on If first guess only counted Chances chosen | trials. 1st guess 1 2d guess Cards Nos. 10-100 Objects Names 36 20 21 8 10 5 7 4 9 3 1 3 1 right in 3>^ 1 right in 4 1 right in 3 1 right in 2 lin52 linOO lin40 Indefinite Totals 85 26 16 To remove the objections which might be based very naturally upon fraud and suggestion in certain TELEPATHY 12S conditions, the Committee made experiments in which the selected objects were known only to one or more of the Committee itself, and the results were sum- marized in the following statistics, the things chosen being variously cards, numbers, and words. There were 497 trials made. Of these, ninety-five were cor- rect on the first guess and forty-five on the second, with five for the third guess. The chances for suc- cess were estimated as one in forty-three, while the actual success was one in 5^, or two per cent, for the chances and nineteen per cent, for successes. I shall choose an instance in which it will be in- structive to reproduce the figures chosen for transmis- sion. They are especially striking, and represent ex- periments performed by Mr. Malcolm Guthrie with a friend, and apparently it was impossible to question their integrity without involving that of Mr. Guthrie himself. Mr. Guthrie was a careful investigator, and describes the experiments as follows, of which the reproductions will give a clear account. " The originals of the following diagrams were for the most part drawn in another room from that in which the * subject ' was placed. The few executed in the same room were drawn while the ' subj ect ' was blindfolded, at a distance from her, and in such a way that the process would have been wholly invis- ible to her or any one else, even had an attempt been made to observe it. During the process of trans- ference, the * agent ' looked steadily and in perfect silence at the original drawing, which was placed upon an intervening wooden stand, the * subject' sitting opposite to him, and behind the stand, blind- Ita.1 OMOUUt. OMW I Ifl ■g. t RlPfKlOUCriOll MtauMaudiiiBB. ■oaa ■o.a ogioiiu osAWM rd. a ORiowAi. DRAwniA [m. Ottnri* uid Mia %' ■» « wwm ouwnib ^MkOdtAlMIUal. B« ■kt ■inoovomA I A AftMt Atnetrr blM. "Am r» Ultnklog of n* ba«M» tt Vuwm, «ttb Aalla tOaP' wl Iaob, "la It • iuU) m • Hikl-^-llua <»» mSmT ^^ ■a I. onomAL ouwma m.1. aoooowncn, noT ft ononuv oiuwiMk •».* •ttweoccTioM. 3 124 TELEPATHY 125 folded and quite still. The ' agent ' ceased looking at the drawing, and the blindfolding was removed, only when the 'subject' professed herself ready to make the reproduction, which happened usually in times varying from half a minute to two or three minutes. Her position rendered it absolutely impos- sible that she should ghmpse at the original. She could not have done so, in fact, without rising from her seat and advancing her head several feet; and as she was almost in the same line of sight as the drawing, and so almost in the centre of the ' agent's ' field of observation, the slightest approach to such a movement must have been instantly detected. The reproductions were in perfect silence, and without the ' agent ' even following the actual process with the eyes, though he was of course able to keep the ' sub- ject ' under the closest observation. " In the case of all the diagrams, except those numbered 7 and 8, the ' agent ' and the ' sub j ect ' were the only two persons in the room during the experiment. In the case of numbers 7 and 8, the ' agent ' and ' subj ect ' were sitting quite apart in a corner of the room, while Mr. Guthrie and Miss E. were talking in another part of it. Numbers 1-6 are especially interesting, as being the complete and consecutive series of a single sitting." It appears that no doubt of the honesty of the " agent " and " subject " in this case exists, but out- siders would require that experiments be performed even in a more careful manner than this. But aside from a critical view of the phenomena, which it is not my purpose here to give, the coincidences have ^tlX a ORKIHAl oRjunMay ■l BIlifiiTlTiiinrn tfe«(alBA.j c^* »•*■;»&£ 5r»r iii«E.^*.»-i««»*|»«;^j-il{5;5J" «,«. (WiWUtflW* y it t a i M iii'* ' ""**'^ Ki,«bdBDM«Hki» ■•! Pft» OMWUtOMH 126 TELEPATHY 127 a claim to investigation that may settle such an issue as they suggest. In later experiments these consid- erations were taken into account. The inaccuracies in the reproductions act decidedly in favor of the integrity of the experiments, but in deference to caution and possible doubts better conditions are necessary. Some very pretty experiments were performed by Professor Balfour Stewart, and among them were instances of drawings with reproductions quite as accurate as any that have been illustrated. It is im- possible to summarize them here further than to say that the reproductions show some interesting defects which have been regarded as the best part of the evi- dence for a causal nexus between what the agent thought or drew and what the percipient reproduced. For instance in one case. Professor Stewart thought of the small letter r, and it appeared to the percipient as a capital i?, the result being something like an hallucination. Experiments of this sort continued during the first eleven years of the Society's work, and extended re- ports of them were made. Critics and sceptics must go to its Proceedings for the measure of their value, and not treat the examples here as scientific proof of telepathy. I can only illustrate the type of phenom- ena which lay claim to that interpretation, and such as have reason to believe the trustworthiness of the experimenters and their conditions will be impressed with such as I have quoted. But I shall refer to two more experiments of an extensive character which have some interest. The first of these is by Mrs. No te. ORKUNAU ORAWUia \^ Ur. Hi>ghe»aocl Mi^ B. Nooontaoli^ No. 16. REPROOUOTION.' waKOmmamnammtmrnt^a 128 TELEPATHY 129 Sidgwick and Miss Alice Johnson in cooperation with Professor Sidgwick and Mr. G. A. Smith in connec- tion with picked subjects, and the second set is by Mr. Myers and Drs. Gibert and Pierre Janet in tele- pathic hypnotism. I shall abbreviate the account of 108 experiments by simply naming a few of the objects thought of and the answers given by the percipient. AGENT PERCIPIENT A little boy with a ball. A little boy with a ball. A kitten in a jar. A cat sitting down. Noah's ark and animals. A fly or bee. Christy minstrel and a banjo. Something long or round — a cage, a can. " " ** {cont.) A man's hand, a black hand. Sailing boat on the sea. Black man with guitar. " " " (cont.) A sailing boat. The result for the 108 experiments was divided into two classes, those when the percipient was in another room than the agent and those when he was in the same room as the agent. In the tabular sum- mary eighteen of the experiments are counted as two for each one, because there were two percipients try- ing to get the same message. But of the class when the percipient and agent were not in the same room there were fifty-five trials and only two successes, forty-four errors, and nine in which no impression came. When the agent and percipient were in the same room there were seventy-one trials and thirty- one successes, twenty-seven errors, and thirteen with- out any impression. This makes more than forty -three per cent, of correct guesses, which is a very striking ISO ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH result when we consider the nature of the objects chosen and the chances against casual coincidence. It is no less interesting to remark the failure as affected by distance and separation. There ought to be more experiments of this type. The next most interesting series in this same set consisted of attempts to produce anaesthesia in a finger of the hand of the percipient by telepathic suggestion. I first give the description of the con- ditions under which the experiments were performed. " The subject, who was always in a normal con- dition at the time of the experiments, sat with his hands passed through holes in a screen extended suf- ficiently above and on each side of him to prevent his seeing the operator or his own hands. The hands were spread out on a table, and the finger to be operated on was silently indicated to Mr. Smith behind the screen by one of ourselves, either by signs or in writ- ing. Mr. Smith generally said nothing while an experiment was going on, and he remained behind the screen until the testing was finished. The subject was frequently engaged by one of us in conversation on topics outside the matter in hand during the process of making the finger insensitive, but sometimes we encouraged him to attend to his own sensations with results which will be described below. When we believed the insensitiveness to have been produced, we ascertained, without moving the screen, which fin- ger it was in by touching the fingers with the point of a pencil or some other convenient instrument, tak- ing care to attack them in varying orders, sometimes beginning with the selected finger and sometimes tak- TELEPATHY 131 ing it later in the series, so that no indication as to which finger we expected to find affected might be given by the order of testing. Occasionally the test- ing was done by one of us who was ignorant of which finger had been selected. Rigidity was ascertained by telling the subject to close his hands, when the affected finger remained extended. We often tried this before testing for insensitiveness, because it was free from the objection that in testing we might pos- sibly ourselves indicate the finger." There were 107 trials at the production of anaes- thesia by telepathy in a selected finger, the finger selected varying as required. There was, of course, one chance out of ten each time that the finger would be guessed, if it were a mere question of telepathy or getting what the agent was thinking about. But here the additional circumstance that anaesthesia was to be produced makes the matter more difficult and interesting. But of the 107 trials sixty-three or nearly fifty-nine per cent, were successes, four or more than four per cent, were partial successes, and forty or more than forty-six per cent, instances were failures. The chances against success were enormous when the whole number is taken into account. The next set of experiments are certainly most remarkable, and were performed by Dr. Pierre Janet and M. Gibert under the observation of Mr. Myers, who was merely an observer and of only a part of the experiments. They are cases of telepathically in- duced hypnosis, and the description of them explains the conditions and results. I give a few examples and then shall summarize the whole set. I give 132 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Janet's account, which is translated in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. " Sleep usually induced by holding her hand. She is then only responsive to the operator. He alone can make contractures disappear, etc. Gaze from operator's eye unnecessary. Slight pressure of thumb suffices ; but no pressure (except severe pres- sure on thumb) is efficacious without mental concen- tration — operator's will to put her to sleep. This influence of the operator's thought, extraordinary as it may seem, is here quite preponderant; so much so that it can take the place of all other influences. Will without touch induces sleep. Taking precau- tions to avoid suggestion, it is found that (1) M. Janet, while sitting near her, sends her to sleep, when, and only when, he wills it; (2) M. Gibert from adjoining room sends her to sleep, M. Janet remain- ing near her, but not willing; there is evidence that the sleep is of M. Giberfs induction, for she is in rapport with him only ; whereas had sleep come from suggestion of operator's proximity, the suggestion would probably have been derived from M. Janet's close presence. Nevertheless, she did not know that Dr. Gibert was in the house. " Oct. 3, 1885, M. Gibert tries to put her to sleep from distance of half a mile; M. Janet finds her awake ; puts her to sleep ; she says, ' I know very well that M. Gibert tried to put me to sleep, but when I felt him I looked for some water, and put my hands in cold water. I don't want people to put me to sleep in that way ; it puts me out, and makes me look TELEPATHY 133 silly.' She had, in fact, held her hands in water at the time when M. Gibert willed her to sleep. " Oct. 9th. M. Gibert succeeds in similar attempt ; she says in trance, ' Why does M. Gibert put me to sleep from his house? I had not time to put my hands in my basin.' That the sleep was of M. Gibert's induction was shown by M. Janet's inabiHty to wake her. M. Gibert had to be sent for. " Oct. 14th. Dr. Gibert again succeeded in induc- ing the trance from a distance of two-thirds of a mile, at an hour suggested by a third person, and not known to M. Janet, who watched the trance. " On Oct. 8th M. Gibert pressed his forehead to hers and gave a mental order (I omit details, pre- cautions, etc.) to offer a glass of water at 11.30 a. m. next day to each person present. At the hour as- signed she showed great agitation, took a glass, came up from the kitchen, and asked if she had been sum- moned, came and went often between salon and kitchen; was put to sleep from a distance by M. Gi- bert ; said, ' I had to come ; why will they make me carry glasses .^^ I had to say something when I came in.' " Mr. Myers then quotes from his own experiments, extending over four days, and of which M. Gibert, M. Marillier, and M. Ochorowicz were witnesses. On April 22d, after several other experiments, " M. Gibert made a mental suggestion, by pressing his forehead against hers without gesture or speech. The suggestion (proposed by me) was that at 11 A. M. on the morrow she should look at a photograph album in the salon of the Pavilion. She habitually sat 134 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH in the kitchen or in her own bedroom and sewed, so this was an unhkely occupation for a morning hour. " On April 23d, MM. Marillier and Ochorowicz went to the Pavilion before eleven and ensconced them- selves in a room opposite the salon. At eleven Madame B. entered the salon and wandered about with an anxious, preoccupied air. Professor Janet, Doctor Myers, and I entered the Pavilion at 11.10 and found her obviously entranced; eyes open, but fixed, anxious, wandering. " She continued thus till 11.25. We remained in a room where she could not see us, though, by look- ing through the partially opened door, we could see her. At 11.25 she began to handle some photo- graphic albums on the table of the salon, and at 11.30 was seated on the sofa fixedly looking at one of these albums, open on her lap, and rapidly sinking into lethargic sleep. As soon as the talkative phase of her slumber came round, she said, ' M. Gibert m'a tourmentee, parce qu'il m'a recoramandee — il m'a fait trembler.' " The results are summarized in a table and it rep- resents twenty-five experiments in all, of which nine- teen or seventy-six per cent, were successes, and six or twenty-four per cent, were failures. The complexity of some of the experiments deprives the critic of ob- jection from chance, and apparently the phenomena present as good claims for a telepathic hypothesis as any one could wish, and the authorities who report them will not be questioned by any but the most rugged sceptics. There is combination of telepathic TELEPATHY 135 suggestion and telepathic transmission of thought in the cases. My own experiments in phenomena bearing upon the problem of telepathy have been very meagre. I have tried it often enough, but succeeded in obtain- ing suggestive results but three times. I shall not detail these; they are not so good as those I have quoted. I mention them as representing a personal acquaintance with coincidental phenomena relevant to the issue, but not sufficient in interest to quote them. I need further opportunities and time to investigate the matter. When it comes to explaining such coincidences as have been indicated in considerable variety here and in much greater variety and complexity in the Soci- ety's Proceedings, telepathy is the term adopted to describe them. I repeat here that this term does not profess to imply any knowledge or belief as to the process involved, but only that the phenomena have to be given a classification which involves two apparently proved facts. (1) That the phenomena are not due to chance, and (2) that they have some causal connection, either directly or indirectly, be- tween living minds, and are not traceable to the ordi- narily known sense impressions. I give no other meaning to the term. I have no conception of how the connection is effected, but I think that the coin- cidences are not due to chance and that seems to me proved beyond all question. The popular notion of " thought waves," " brain waves," " thought vibra- tions," " electricity," and various allied explanations of the " transmission " I wholly repudiate, not as 136 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH necessarily false, but as without any evidence what- ever. Those who have jumped to such conclusions for defining telepathy have prevented the scientific man from considering the facts that undoubtedly dis- lodge the theory of chance. The supposition that everything is due to vibrations is one that is borrowed from many speculations in physical science, where the supposition is frankly recognized as hypothetical and not as a proved fact. But there is even a reaction there now against this universal solvent by wave motions, even though it is an' important factor in all explanations. But however useful undulatory theories may be in the study of physical phenomena they have not yet found any rational place in mental phenomena. Let me urge, however, that I do not deny their presence or their possible explanation of all mental phenomena, normal and supernormal, but I deny that there is one iota of scientific evidence that they either characterize thought or explain it. When it is proved that vibrations constitute the nature of normal consciousness, we can take up the question of its modification and application to the supernormal. But we cannot apply it scientifically under any other conditions. Even if we could apply it, I do not see that it helps us in the explanation of certain aspects of the phenomena. It is easy to talk about vibrations in the transmission of thought when we think of the speculative analogies in telegraphic and telephonic messages, but the moment that we inquire critically into the matter the problem becomes perplexing. Suffice it to say that I refuse at present to have any conception of what the process is in what is called TELEPATHY 13T telepathy. I do not know how it is effected, whether by vibrations of the ether between two minds, whether it is by some physical vibrations non-ethereal, whether it is by some transcendental agency of an intelligent sort, or whether it is by some new kind of relation not expressible in terms of motion at all. I leave all these to the imagination. I confess entire ignorance in regard to the modus operandi of the phenomenon. It would be very desirable to know something about this, but I know nothing about it, and I doubt if any one else knows. All that I should maintain is that there is some cause other than chance for the explanation of such coincidences, and as they are of a type not found in normal experience, which depends upon gross sensory perception, we cannot do better than to classify them outside these experiences by the term telepathy, and insist that it shall define an exceptional causal nexus between two minds in the impressions they have. Those who rely upon a theory of vibrations, waves, and analogies of electricity in the telegraph and telephone for making telepathy intelligible, or ex- plaining it in terms of motion, do not seem to have the slightest conception of the difficulties involved in their comparison, or of the scientific man's per- plexity in connection with such a theory. We con- ceive in our common view that messages are sent over the telegraph wire or through the telephone, when in fact nothing of the kind occurs. To put it broadly, nothing but a mechanical phenomenon takes place in these processes and we interpret it, after having made a prior agreement in regard to what certain 138 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH physical events shall mean. All that the telegraph does is to transmit certain vibrations, and by a process of previously arranged interruptions in this transmission we can use certain physical effects as signs of certain letters or words, and we then in- terpret these signs accordingly. No messages are transmitted in any psychological sense. None but an artificial connection exists between the message and the mode of transmitting it. Without this artificial arrangement no thought could ever be transmitted by the telegraph-wire. The telephone appears to be somewhat different. We obtain the voice in that instance, and the phenomena appear to be exactly like that of ordinary vocal communication between men. But here we have the same conditions that ob- tain in ordinary conversation, where we forget that the same general artificial arrangement has to be made in order to effect an exchange of ideas. In ordinary and normal modes of " transmitting " our ideas and thoughts we do not " communicate," as that word is understood in mechanical terms, but we interpret agreed signs. In our normal life our minds are as completely isolated from the " communi- cation " of thoughts as two people are isolated when no telegraph-line connects them. We have to fix upon certain signs or sounds as indicating certain ideas, and then infer that these ideas are present when those signs occur. Our limitations in " communication " with each other are quite apparent, when we think about them, in the meeting of strangers who do not have the same language. They cannot exchange ideas at all, except by contriving some suitable sym- TELEPATHY 139 bols as arbitrary signs of the ideas to be indicated. All the vibrations in the world would not help them. They may talk all they please or they may produce all the physical phenomena they like, and yet no con- ception of the one would be intelligible to the other without the previous acceptance of a code or set of symbols related, but not identical, with the thoughts to be " communicated." In other words we do not " communicate " ideas in normal life, but we interpret signs. The vibrations of sound are not the communi- cation of thoughts, but they are only physical events which we use as we use the Morse symbols in the tele- graph. All that the telephone does is to reproduce the sounds that are produced by the voice, and we interpret sounds in this as we interpret the Morse symbols. The consequence is that vibrations are not the trans- mission of thoughts but the means by which we can infer the presence of certain ideas when we have previously agreed to indicate by these symbols what thoughts we have. We do not make telepathy intelligible by supposing thought waves, as we do not make the normal interpretation of " communi- cation " intelligible by them. It is precisely the absence of all such analogies between normal " com- munication " and telepathic " transmission " that makes the latter so inexplicable. It is not the vibra- tions in the physical world that transmit thought, and we have no reason to believe that any such media can " transmit " it in the telepathic phenomena. The term is but a name for a supernormal fact not yet made intelligible, and we have only to examine care- 140 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH fully the real nature of telegraphic and telephonic, as well as ordinary " communication " of thoughts, to see that an appeal to vibrations does not help us to solve the difficulty. It only increases the perplexities already existing. I cannot enter here into any elaborate definition of what explanation is in things general, as that would require a chapter. But I shall briefly state that we understand things better when we find the familiar experiences with which they are associated. If we find certain phenomena constantly occurring in con- nection with certain others, we are satisfied that they are somehow necessarily connected. But if they are isolated and unfamiHar we feel puzzled by them. Now it is the isolated character of phenomena claim- ing to be telepathic that puzzles the scientific and explanatory mind. Telepathy is such an unheard of fact, so removed from all the known methods of communication between mind and mind, that we do not easily find the facts that make it intelligible, and wanting clear intelligibility for the understanding, it is either questioned as a fact or classified as un- known. I fully sympathize with this attitude of mind, even when I do not agree that it treats the phenomena rightly. For it is unquestionably correct in asking for some means to bridge the enormous chasm that exists between normal and supernormal phenomena, as it appears to our first reflections. Until it find some means of connecting telepathy with what is familiar, even though it be through more or less infrequent facts known to abnormal psychology, the term can stand for nothing but the fact of a TELEPATHY 141 mysterious causal nexus awaiting further discovery and elucidation. Spontaneous coincidences show that it is a very sporadic phenomenon in our ordinary experience, and experiment shows that it is only less rare than the spontaneous. But in both we find a most interesting circumstance, namely, that it is often associated with certain peculiar actions of the mind that lie on the border-line of the abnormal. If, then, we can find its phenomena taking on characteristics of subconscious and abnormal mental facts, we may ascertain some clue to its explanation. Investigation and experiment along those lines which will ascertain the associations of the phenomena will reduce the perplexities in them. I shall recur to this in the conclusion and after I have discussed other types of coincidental phenomena. All that we are called upon to remark about telep- athy in the present state of knowledge regarding it is that it reveals a vast undiscovered field of agencies which our ordinary experience does not suspect. What is called hypersesthesia is a hint of it. This is a technical term for acute sensibility, and recent investigations have shown that remarkable instances of this acute sensibility exist, and in hypnosis it has been discovered that what there often passes for anaes- thesia, or the complete absence of sensibility, is accom- panied by very acute subliminal sensibility. These facts suggest a way to begin bridging the chasm between normal and supernormal experience. Hyper- aesthesia, as conceived in psychiatry, will not explain all the coincidences that suggest telepathy, but it may show to the physiologist that the boundaries of 142 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH knowledge are not what he had previously supposed, and when this is once established he can present no ,^ a priori objections to their extension by telepathy; \ and it is in this view that we discover the significance for a deeper conception of the universe than the grosser materialism of the past could dream of. I do not follow the hopes and speculations of those who talk about unlimited supernormal communication between mind and mind, and do not think that the present state of human development requires any such extensive process. I am quite content with the merely widening conception which sporadic phenomena give us in regard to the world around us, and so with the adjustment of life to the immediate environment in which we are placed. But history has shown us that man's best achievements are effected under the con- viction that his present knowledge does not end his hopes and deeds. If he can feel that there is still a wider territory to conquer, he will work with that in view, and any limitation of his knowledge to the grosser deliverances of sense will correspondingly limit hope and endeavor. The fact of telepathy, therefore, if only as a still undiscovered causal nexus between minds, has the virtue of assigning limits to an immoderate dogmatism that so easily and quickly associates itself with the pride of knowledge, whether it be religious, political, or scientific. I attach to it, at present, no other utility. This does not imply that its usefulness is small ; for it is not. Any such widen- ing of the processes of the world as it implies must effect as revolutionary a view of things as Copernican astronomy and Newtonian gravitation and perhaps TELEPATHY 143 Darwinian evolution. But to have this povver it is not necessary to give it the conception which absurd speculations, physical and mental, advance to define its nature and possibilities. We are not helped by throwing the reins loose to the imagination and ac- cepting illusions instead of facts. We must first know the laws affecting the supernormal before we can trust our fancies with it. We may convince our- selves that we have opened a mysterious world, but this is not to determine its character. Consequently I would not press the phenomena of telepathy at present farther than to say that they reveal a mar- ginal world of activities which it would be well to explore. CHAPTER VI DREAMS The student of psychology has no perplexities with our ordinary dreams. He may not always be able to assign the exact cause for the matter of men's dreams, but he knows the general nature of the influences that determine their occurrence. But it was not always so. History and tradition show that it is only in recent times that the mysteries associated with them were successfully unravelled, though the intelligent of all ages may have discarded the romancing of the popu- lar judgment. I cannot here enter into any complete account of what ancient times thought of dreams, but I may briefly indicate the conceptions among savages and ignorant people. In so far as the records show, savages seem to have generally treated the dream-life as real. Intelligence had not advanced enough to enable them to discriminate between the experiences of noraial life and those of sleep, except to maintain that the two worlds were not the same, though ahke. The consequence was that, with the belief that the soul left the body in sleep, the savage had no difficulty in classing all types of dreams together, those the product of reciTidescent memories and those having a real or supernormal character. Many of the Greeks and Romans had much the same conception of the matter, though it is probable that it was derived from 144 DREAMS 145 those dreams which were apparently supernormal and certainly coincidental, other types of them being dis- regarded in the unscientific condition of the age. Even the Epicureans admitted the existence of the gods on the evidence of dreams, but they gave them no power to influence physical events. Previous to the philosophic period of Greek culture dreams were looked upon very much as we find them in the Old Testament. The story of Joseph and his dreams illustrates what the Hebrews thought of them in their early history, and in both Greek and Oriental civiH- zations the same general view seems to have prevailed, namely, that dreams were revelations of the divine. In primitive peoples it was not so much a communi- cation from the divine as it was either experiences of the soul when out of the body in sleep, wandering about in another world, or communication with the deceased. That they were a revelation from higher powers seems to have been the result of a civilization infected with a more definite theology, polytheistic, or monotheistic. But until this more systematic type of thought arose the simpler view indicated seems to have prevailed. In fact we may suppose the poly- theistic theory to have arisen out of a modification of the theory of communication with the discamate, as there are many traces of this evolution in early Greece, the distinction between the gods and deified heroes not being clearly drawn. Before man system- atized his view of the cosmos, he had only his dream- life, illusions, and hallucinations to guide his specu- lations, and these took the form of perceptions in another world or communications with the deceased, 146 ENIGMAS 01^ PSYCHICAL RESEARCH which were Httle different from the former. " The New Zealanders," says Tylor in his Primitive Culture, " considered the dreaming soul to leave the body and return, even travelling to the region of the dead to hold converse with its friends. The Tagals of Luzon object to waking a sleeper, on account of the absence of his soul. The Karens, whose theory of the wander- ing soul has just been noticed, explain dreams to be what this la (soul) sees and experiences in its jour- neys when it has left the body asleep. The North American Indians allowed themselves the alternative of supposing a dream to be a visit from the soul of the person or object dreamt of, or a sight seen by the rational soul, gone out for an excursion while the sensitive soul remains in the body. So the Zulu may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in a dream to visit distant people, and see that they are in trouble ; as for the man who is passing into the morbid con- dition of the professional seer, phantoms are con- tinually coming to talk to him in sleep, till he be- comes, as the expressive native phrase is, ' a house of dreams.' " To the Greek of old, the dream-soul was what to the modern savage it still is. Sleep, loosing cares of mind, fell on Achilles as he lay by the sounding sea, and there stood over him the soul of Patroclus, like to him altogether in stature, and the beauteous eyes, and the voice, and the garments that wrapped his skin ; he spake and Achilles stretched out to grasp DREAMS 147 him with loving hands, but caught him not, and Hke a smoke the soul sped twittering below the earth." Though philosophy tended to eliminate this belief, it did not wholly dislodge it. Like the belief in the oracles, it looked at the phenomena with a cautious eye and often accepted it in some form. Only the most radical spirits wholly overcame the prevailing superstitions. Plato admitted the divine manifesta- tion in sleep and a prophetic character for dreams. Aristotle was as wary as he had been about the ora- cles, and yet accepted the possibility of the popular belief. " That there is a divination concerning some things in dreams is not incredible," said that greatest of all ancient thinkers. The Stoics, if Cicero is to be trusted, reasoned that if the gods cared for men they would reveal their purposes in sleep. The Chris- tian Church could hardly escape the same admission. Its Scriptures were full of the doctrine, and one need only mention the fact to secure its recognition. But in spite of these facts, the natural tendencies of both the philosophic and the religious mind were away from the belief. The philosopher could not escape, after Socrates and Plato, considering the mind's point of view in the investigation of psycho- logical phenomena, and the Church had so idealized the conception of the divine and placed it so remote from human contact that its dispensation in the trivial rather than the weightier matters of providence scan- dalized the dignity of God. In the process of time the belief lost its hold, except to be held as a necessity of past providential scheme. Like miracles, dreams, as a vehicle of divine communication, ceased to be 148 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH a source of revelation, and as philosophic and scien- tific views of man and his mental action prevailed the phenomena became the products of fancy and other " natural " causes. St. Augustine, devout a theologian as he was, was sceptical of their foreign origin, and thought even the most striking of them the product of imagination. The extent to which the older view prevailed until more careful observation and other influences modi- fied it is apparent in a statement of the writer in the EncT/clopwdia Britanmca. " In the De Divinatione of Cicero," says this author, " we have almost an unique instance among classic writings of a complete rejection of the doctrine of the supernatural origin of dreams, and of a full and consistent adoption of the natural method of explaining the phenomena. Cicero's position stands in marked contrast to that of partial sceptics, as, for example, Pliny, who seems content to exclude from the supernatural method of explanation certain of the more obviously natural dreams, such as those occurring immediately after food and wine, or when one has fallen asleep after waking." Among philosophic minds this view began to prevail, but among early and mediaeval physicians, men who were brought into contact with pathological conditions of the mind and body, and who were attached either to ancient or Christian views generall}^ there continued a belief in at least occasional supernatural dreams, while the admission was free that most of them were affairs of the mind and body. The rise of that psychology which recog- nized the active and subjective functions of the mind DREAMS 149 strengthened this view of a " natural " origin, and the more that a scientific study of them was made the more acceptable became this position. I shall not discuss at any length the nature and causes of our ordinary dreams, as intelligent readers know well enough the explanation of them. We do not know as yet how to explain the material contents of many of them except in the most general way, but the fact that they are the result of definite and indefinite bodily conditions is so well recognized that we can make no mystery of their occurrence beyond the puzzling nature of their contents. Pressure in the stomach, in the blood-vessels, irritation in the sensorium, defects of assimilation, narcotics, muscu- lar fatigue, or any sensory stimulus, conscious or subconscious, and the thousand conditions affecting the integrity of the organism, avail to start a dream, and its contents may be anything as unrelated to the stimulus as the ordinary sensation is related. A story is told of a man dreaming that he was walk- ing on the ice at the North Pole, and awakening he found his foot out from under the bedclothes ex- posed to a cool temperature. A feeling of malaise may give rise to a nightmare in which the sensations are enormously exaggerated and distorted. I re- member once that work in a hay-field, more than ten years after I had been accustomed to work of this sort, resulted in a muscular condition which was as- sociated with dreams of my childhood that I had not had the like of for years. In fact I so seldom dream of my childhood that I might safely say that these were almost my only dreams of that period. Be- 150 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH sides, my dreams are not frequent and not easily remembered when they do occur. Occasional dis- turbance in the stomach causes a troubled sleep with unpleasant dreams. Fear and anxiety will produce various types of dreams repeating features of this fear or anxiety in some exaggerated form, or objects wholly out of a natural relation to such mental states. I remember that anxiety about my lessons in the High School resulted in both relevant and irrelevant dreams. One author attributes the dreams of run- ning, flying, resisting, struggling, to certain condi- tions of the muscles. Experiments made by Maury showed interesting results. Stimuli were applied to a sleeping subject, and he was awakened to tell his dream. " When, for example, his hps were tickled, he dreamt that he was subj ected to horrible tortures ; that pitch plaster was applied to his face and then torn off." These are illustrations of external stimuli, at least most of them, but there are internal influences such as ideas and emotions, or such as are in the memory and representing the momentum of the mind's action before the suspended functions in sleep take place. They are associations with our previous states of con- sciousness. Only one type of these is particularly interesting here. It is a type mentioned by Maury. He found that automatic central excitations pro- duced dream images of objects which had never been distinctly perceived, and which nevertheless had left a trace of their action subliminally. This is a phe- nomenon similar to the instances of recall by crystal vision by Miss Goodrich-Freer, referred to above. DREAMS 151 The bodily influences, therefore, which are the most frequent causes of ordinary dreams, are re- ducible to three general types. (1) Subliminal or unconscious stimuli on the periphery of the organism, and so the external sensorium. (2) Subliminal stim- uli on the internal sensorium or at any aff ectible part of the bodily tissue. (3) Central influences, cere- bral or mental, aff^ecting the mental action of the mind or brain. This may be, as intimated in one statement, nothing but subliminal mental states them- selves. They are all summarizable in the one principle of causality, namely, intra-organic and normal extra- organic stimuli or influences. The older theory sup- posed that the influences were wholly extra-organic, and so distinctly analogous to the influence of an external world in our normal sensations. Those views representing the beliefs of savages and the early Greeks show this very clearly. But the modern doc- trine, which is overwhelmingly supported by the facts of both normal and abnormal psychology, confines these stimuli to intra-organic agencies, at least for all ordinary dreams, which in their statistics show such uniformity in this respect as to make any other type of dream and influence very incredible. It is a natural maxim that we should not interpret a dream as anything but the result of some abnormal or sub- liminal stimulus within the organism and not ex- pressive of any external world in the form in which the dream usually represents it. If there is a normal correspondence between the dream image and the stimulus we simply assume that the subject is in a waking state. The dream proper shows little or no 152 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH articulation between stimulus and product, the con- tents of the dream having no natural relation to its cause. Hence the attempt to make any mystery of dreams generally, to demand that they shall have some " supernatural " interpretation, or to seek some explanation of them in the influence of a supersen- sible world or agencies, now meets with no favor ; and certainly this sober and conservative view is the only safe one for all but the rarest exceptions which still have to have their claims tested. The whole burden of proof rests on the person who asserts or believes that any dream whatsoever has an extra- organic stimulus suggesting supernormal knowledge or agencies. But there are certain facts which make it possible that dreams may be occasionally induced by stimuli that are neither normal nor intra-organic. The first of these is the circumstance that, as the prevailing theory actually assumes, subliminal stimuli excite the dreaming state. It is, perhaps, this circumstance that gives rise to the peculiar nature of the dream's contents, and if it is subliminal in its cause it will only be a matter of the kind of evidence to find that the stimulus is extra-organic. We found in crystal vision that subliminal stimuli, that is, sensory im- pressions not noticed at the time of their occurrence, may be induced to rise into consciousness afterward by the crystal. In many cases the phenomena repre- senting a telepathic stimulus also represent hallu- cinatory results precisely like those of dreams ; and we also found that normal anaesthesia was sometimes associated with subliminal hyperaesthesia, which means DREAMS 153 that, when we sometimes suppose that the mind is wholly insensible or inaccessible to outside influences it is even more sensitive to them than in the normal state, though the normal consciousness is not aware of the fact and does not remember the impressions, unless reproduced by hypnotic suggestion or other similar means. All these circumstances, the recall of latent and subliminal impressions by the crystal, the paradox of hypersesthesia when the sensorium shows normal anaesthesia, and the hallucinatory tendency of tele- pathic impressions, which are distant extra-organic stimuli, show that the mind may be affected by outside influences in its normal condition, and we might ex- pect that the dream-life should exhibit analogous ef- fects, and these we may find in coincidental dreams. It will be only a question of evidence to prove the fact. This evidence, of course, must be of the best kind and proportioned partly to the consequences involved and partly to the numerical character of the alleged coincidences. Whether we have this evidence suffi- cient in quantity and quality to accept the fact of supernormal dreams will depend somewhat upon the nature and number of the instances claiming that character, and there will be great differences of opin- ion regarding it, according to the attitude with which men's minds approach the facts, real or alleged. But whether provable or not, I shall give some instances of recorded dreams that certainly suggest some ex- tra-organic cause. In selecting illustrations I shall confine the choice to cases in which no supposition of ordinary hypersesthesia is possible. 154 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH The first incident which I shall quote is confirmed by two other witnesses than the dreamer. I shall abbreviate some instances, but this one I shall quote in full. It is taken from Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. The reporter is a Mrs. Howie- son, the experience being her own and involving a distance of two hundred miles between the percipient and the supposed agent. " The incident which I promised to you occurred in June, 1883 (recorded in 1889). My eldest daugh- ter Kathleen, then a child nearly five years old, was absent from home on a visit to my mother, who lived in Newport, Monmouthshire. " For some months previous to her leaving home, she had been in a weak, nervous state of health, but an absence of three months in that charming county, and living almost entirely out-of-doors, wrought wonders for her. My mother wrote to me from time to time, saying how well she could climb the hills, and how her nervousness had given place to joyous glee, as she watched from a hilltop the ships sailing in sunlight up and down the Bristol Channel, or the wonderfully fascinating, gorgeous sunsets over Twm Barium, which even now she dreams of. " All my anxiety about her had vanished, and with my little baby three weeks old beside me, I was quietly sleeping when I suddenly awaked, hearing Kathleen call me, in a sharp, terrified voice, ' Mamma, oh ! mamma ! ' Forgetting that the child was away, I sat up in bed and called to my nurse, saying, ' Do see, nurse, what ails Kathleen,' ^ Why, ma'am,' she DREAMS 155 said, * you've been dreaming, sure you know she's in Newport.' " Thoroughly awake, I laughed and lay down to sleep; but just as I was dozing off again, I was startled by hearing the child's voice calling down the stairs from the next floor, where she slept when at home, the same words, ' Mamma, oh ! mamma ! ' I simply screamed to nurse, ' Oh, nurse, I've heard her again, and there is something wrong with the child.' I trembled all over, the thing was so real; and yet so unlikely, that I allowed myself to be soothed, and talked into silence. " No sooner had nurse settled herself comfort- ably in bed, and I, broad awake, was lying wonder- ing about it, when Kathleen's cry broke on my ears again, a scream, ' Mamma, oh ! mamma, I've got scarlet fever, I've got scarlet fever ! ' There was no more sleep for me that night. My husband came in and tried to calm me, in vain. When the morning came he telegraphed to Newport, and this is the sequel : *"' The evening before, Kathleen complained of headache going to bed, and after she went to bed grew hot and feverish, so much so that my mother sat up with her, hoping to see her go to sleep. All the night she kept saying, ' I wish mamma was here,' ' I don't know why I left my mamma.' But as the small hours of the morning drew on she grew so ill that my father fetched the doctor. On seeing her he said it was just possible she had caught scarlet fever, as it was very prevalent just then. Directly the child heard what he said, the wild scream I had 156 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH heard broke from her, in the very words, ' Mamma, oh! mamma, I've got scarlet fever, I've got scarlet fever ! ' And nearly two hundred miles away they were flashed to my ears." Mr. Howieson vouches for the correctness of this story and the father of Mrs. Howieson, Rev. John Douglas, at whose house the child was staying, vouches for what occurred with the child, including the phrases which she had uttered. The next case also involves independent confirma- tion. It is a case in which the dream was repeated almost immediately after it first occurred, and is taken from the Phantasms of the Living. The authors of that work remark that it is rare that a dream is repeated the same night. " When we were living at Leamington, I had a remarkable vision. I was sleeping with my sister Maria. Suddenly the curtains of our bed, at the side I slept, were undrawn, and Mr. L. appeared standing there. He said, addressing me by name, ' My mother is dead.' I tried to persuade myself I had been dreaming, and Maria said that I had dreamt it; but after a short time the same thing was done again, and the same announcement made. I was rather chaffed at breakfast because of the story I told. After breakfast I went into the drawing-room to practise. Presently I heard myself called, and I went out to the balcony to listen. It was the daughter of the man whom I had seen twice at night, and the granddaughter of the old lady whose death had been announced. She was riding on horseback. DREAMS 157 She said, ' Have you heard? My father is sent for, and my grandmother is dead ! ' " The sister who was sleeping with the narrator corroborates the incidents. A curious feature of it is the vision of the old lady's son, he being alive and possibly sent for about the time of the dream, before or after. A Mr. Wingfield narrates the following as having occurred in 1880, and it was put on record in 1883. " On the night of Thursday, the 25th of March, 1880, I retired to bed after reading till late, as is my habit. I dreamed that I was lying on my sofa, reading, when, on looking up, I saw distinctly the figure of my brother, Richard Wingfield-Baker, sit- ting on the chair before me. I dreamed that I spoke to him, but that he simply bent his head in reply, rose, and left the room. When I awoke, I found my- self standing with one foot on the ground by my bedside, and the other on the bed, trying to speak and to pronounce my brother's name. So strong was the impression as to the reality of his presence and so vivid the whole scene as dreamt, that I left my bedroom to search for my brother in the sitting- room. I examined the chair where I had seen him seated; I returned to bed, tried to fall asleep in the hope of a repetition of the appearance, but my mind was too excited, too painfully disturbed, as I re- called what I had dreamed. I must have, however, fallen asleep towards the morning, but when I awoke, the impression of my dream was as vivid as ever — and I may add is to this very hour equally strong and clear. My sense of impending evil was so strong 158 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH that I at once made a note in my memorandum-book of this ' appearance,' and added the words, ' God forbid.' " Three days afterward I received the news that my brother, Richard Wingfield-Baker, had died on Thursday evening, the 25th of March, 1880, at 8.30 p. M., from the effects of terrible injuries re- ceived in a fall while hunting with the Blackmore Vale hounds. " I will only add that I had been living in this town some twelve months ; that I had not had any recent communication with my brother; that I knew him to be in good health, and that he was a perfect horseman. I did not at once communicate this dream to any intimate friend — there was unluckily none here at that moment — but I did relate the story after the receipt of the news of my brother's death and showed the entry in my memorandum-book. As evidence, of course, this is worthless ; but I give you my word of honor that the circumstances I have re- lated are the positive truth." The correctness of Mr. Wingfield's memory as to date of his brother's death is confirmed in the London Times, and the Prince de Lucinge Faucigny, a friend, corroborates the story as having been told him by Mr. Wingfield on April 4th, 1880, in Paris, and that Mr. Wingfield showed him the note in the memo- randum-book. Another instance has similar corroboration. I shall abbreviate it, though it contains interesting details. A lady dreamed that she was looking out a window and saw her father driving in a sledge, DREAMS 159 followed by another in which was her brother. " They had to pass a cross-road, on which another traveller was driving very fast, also in a sledge with one horse. Father seemed to drive on without observing the other fellow, who would without fail have driven over father if he had not made his horse rear, so that I saw my father drive under the hoofs of the horse. Every moment I expected the horse would fall down and crush him. I called out ' Father ! father ! ' and woke in great fright. The next morning my father and brother returned. I said to him, ' I am glad to see you arrive quite safely, as I had such a dreadful dream about you last night.' My brother said, ' You could not have been in greater fright about him than I was,' and then related to me what happened, which tallied exactly with my dream. My brother in his fright when he saw the feet of the horse over father's head called out, ' Oh ! father, father!'" The brother confirms the story and that his sister told him the dream in accordance with the facts. The case, like many others, is regarded by the au- thors of the Phantasms of the Living as belonging to the weak class, owing to several circumstances, lapse of time, and the dangers of illusions of identity and memory. But they regard it as coincidental, never- theless. Dr. Robert H. Collyer, F. C. S., tells the following story, which is, of course, second hand, but is con- firmed by one of the living parties concerned. " On January 3d, 1856, my brother Joseph be- ing in command of the steamer Alice ^ on the Missis- 160 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH sippi, just above New Orleans, she came in collision with another steamer. The concussion caused the flagstaff or pole to fall with great violence, which, coming in contact with my brother's head, actually divided the skull, causing, of necessity, instant death. In October, 1857, I visited the United States. When at my father's residence, Camden, New Jersey, the melancholy death of my brother became the subject of conversation, my mother narrated to me that at the very time of the accident, the apparition of my brother Joseph was presented to her. This fact was corroborated by my father and four sisters. Camden, New Jersey, is distant from the scene of the acci- dent, in a direct line, over one thousand miles, and nearly double that distance by the mail route. My mother mentioned the fact of the apparition on the morning of the 4th of January to my father and sisters ; nor was it until the 16th, or thirteen days after, that a letter was received confirming in every particular the extraordinary visitation. It will be important to mention that my brother William and his wife lived near the locality of the dreadful acci- dent, now being in Philadelphia ; they have also corroborated to me the details of the impression pro- duced on my mother." Mr. A. E. Colly er confirms the story. Various circumstances make caution about details necessary, but at least a most important coincidence seems to have been assured. There is one supported by the testimony of four persons, though it seems to have occurred while the DREAMS 161 subject was wide awake, but early in the morning, so that it may be considered a waking dream. " About 2 o'clock on the morning of October 21st, 1881 (recorded in 1883), while I was perfectly wide awake, and looking at the lamp burning on my wash- stand, a person, as I thought, came into my room by mistake, and stopped, looking into the looking- glass on the table. It soon occurred to me it repre- sented Robinson Kelsey, by his dress and wearing his hair long behind. When I raised myself up in bed and called out, it instantly disappeared. The next day I mentioned to some friends of mine how strange it was. So thoroughly convinced was I, that I searched the local papers that day (Saturday) and the following Tuesday, believing his death would be in one of them. On the following Wednesday, a man, who formerly was my drover, came and told me Robinson Kelsey was dead. Anxious to know at what time he died, I wrote to Mr. Wood, the family undertaker at Lingfield; he learnt from the brother- in-law of the deceased that he died at 2 a. m. He was my first cousin, and was apprenticed formerly to me as a miller; afterwards he lived with me as journey- man; altogether, eight years. I never saw anything approaching that before. I am seventy-two years old, and never feel nervous ; I am not afraid of the dead or their spirits." This narrative is signed by a Mr. Marchant and attested by three others who assert that Mr. Mar- chant told them of the experience the next day after it happened. Mr. Marchant had not spoken to the man for twenty years. 16S ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH A gentleman reports a case in which he put his wife to sleep and she seemed to go into a dream state and remarked that she could not attend to certain things, as she was thinking out her husband's thoughts. He requested an explanation and the wife replied in her sleep, " About Jimmy B., it is so strange because I never saw him in my life; but you were thinking about him." The husband was ready to deny that he was thinking about him when his wife went on : " You w ere dreaming of him last night, and said, ' Poor Jimmy,' in your sleep, so I was obliged to follow out your thought this morn- ing." She then went on to remind her husband that Jimmy " had gone to a party with my brothers, sisters, and self; that he drank too much and was ill for several days at our house, my mother nurs- ing him." This Mr. Corder, the reporter, says hap- pened before he became acquainted with his wife, and he could not recall dreaming about the boy. But his sister remembered the circumstances and confirms the story of the boy's intoxication and nurs- ing. The authors of the Phantasms of the Living think that more information was given in the lady's dream than was likely to have been uttered by Mr. Corder in his subconscious dream. There is a very pretty instance involving the ap- parently simultaneous phantasm of the ideas in the dreamer's mind by the person concerned. " On June 10th, 1883 (recorded in February, 1884), I had the following dream. Some one told me that Miss Elliott was dead. I instantly, in my dream, rushed to her room, entered it, went to her DREAMS 163 bedside and pulled the clothes off her face. She was quite cold; her eyes were wide open and star- ing at the ceiling. This so frightened me that I dropped at the foot of her bed, and knew no more until I was half out of bed in my room and wide awake. The time was 5 o'clock a. m. Before leav- ing my room I told this dream to my sister, as it had been such an unpleasant one." The narrative is signed by Miss Constance Bevan, and her sister, Miss Elsie Bevan, confirms the state- ment that the dream had been mentioned before leav- ing the room in the morning. The following is the narrative of Miss Elliott, the lady whose death had been the subject of Miss Bevan's dream. " I awoke on the morning of June 10th (record dated February, 1884), and was lying on my back with my eyes fixed on the ceiling, when I heard the door open and felt some one come in and bend over me, but not far enough to come between my eyes and the ceiling; knowing it was only C, I did not move, but instead of kissing me she suddenly drew back, and going towards the foot of the bed, crouched down there. Thinking this very strange, I closed and opened my eyes several times, to convince myself that I was really awake, and then turned my head to see if she had left the door open, but found it still shut. Upon this a sort of horror came over me, and I dared not look towards the figure, which was crouching in the same position, gently moving the bedclothes from my feet. I tried to call to the occupant of the next room, but my voice failed. At this moment she touched my bare foot, and a cold 164 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH chill ran over me, and I knew nothing more till I found myself out of bed looking for C, who must, I felt, be still in the room. I never doubted that she had really been there until I saw both doors fastened on the inside. On looking at my watch it was a few minutes past five." Miss Antonia Bevan states that " the first thing in the morning, Miss Elliott told me all about her unpleasant dream, before speaking to any one else." It is apparent that Miss Elliott's experience was not like an ordinary dream, though it has some features of this phenomenon. Whatever it was, its relation to the details of Miss Constance Sevan's dream is most interesting. A most striking coincidence is recorded in the dream of a man who made a note of it in his diary at the time, and this diary was inspected by Mr. Gurncy. I shall have to give the account in full, as it contains evidential incidents of some importance in establishing the probability of the story and the nature of the coincidence. " In December, 1881 (recorded in 1886), we were living at 6 George Street, Melbourne, Victoria. My father resided then, as he does now, at Phillmore Lodge, Kensington (London, England). In those da3^s I always went to bed about midnight. I awoke suddenly, tremendously startled by a dream that my father's house was on fire. The dream impressed me so vividly that I felt convinced that a fire had actually happened there, and, striking a light, I walked across the room to the dressing-table, on which my diary lay (I used generally to jot down the DREAMS 165 events of the day just before turning in), and made a brief entry of it, there and then, first looking at my watch in order to be able to set down the time, which I found to be 1 a. m. I had, therefore, been in bed less than an hour, which of itself seems to add an extraordinary feature to the case (I refer to my sinking to sleep, dreaming and waking up, as after a long sleep, in so short a space of time). The entry of my diary is, as it was likely to be when standing out of bed, very brief: ' At night I dreamt that the kitchen in my father's house was on fire. I awoke and found that it was 1 a. m.' I kept my diary in a plain paper book; and the entry came below what I did up to midnight on December 22d. What I further still remember distinctly of the vision is this — that in it, the servants' bedrooms (which are really at the top of my father's house, while the kitchen, etc., are at the bottom) were adjoining the kitchen suite, all on one floor, and that the smoke and blaze seemed general. Further, I remember distinctly, though I just made a bare entry in my diary and hurried back to bed, that two of father's maids, named Coombes and Caroline respectively, were the only persons except myself present in the vision, and that I seemed to have no impulses and no power of mov- ing, but was merely a spectator; nor did the idea of risk to myself form part of the impression. " Six or seven weeks afterwards (mail contract between London and Melbourne is forty-two days) I received a letter from my father, dated December 22d, 1881. He wrote, 'We had a fire on Sunday evening while we were at church. Coombes went with 166 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH a wax taper to tidy her room and, I suppose, blew it out and put it down with sparks. Very soon after she left, a ring at the bell that the attic was on fire put Caroline on her mettle while the other lost her head. She dashed it out with water before the win- dow-frame was burnt through, and subdued it. Fifteen pounds will repair the damage — two chests of drawers much burnt, wearing apparel, etc. I gave her a sovereign for her pluck, as the roof would have been on fire in another five minutes.' " Now I wish to draw your attention to what has attracted my attention most. The Sunday before December 2Sd, 1881, was December 18th. I had the communication, therefore, in my sleep, not on the actual day of the fire, but on the day on which my father wrote the letter. At Kensington, where my father was writing, Australian letters have to be posted in the branch offices about 5 p. m. My dream was a 1 A. M. Time in Victoria 9% hours ahead of English time. When I was having the communi- cation, therefore, it was about 3.30 p. m. in Kensing- ton. Now with the mail going out at 5 p. m., 3.30 would have been a very natural — I think I may say a most natural time for my father to be finish- ing a letter to me. [Mr. Sladen, Sen., confirms this.] I, therefore, had my magnetic communication when he was at once focussing his mind on me, and fo- cussing his mind on the fire, in order to tell me about it. " I have asked my wife, and she remembers per- fectly my waking her up, and telling her that I had dreamt that my father's house was on fire, and was DREAMS 16T so convinced of its betokening an actual occurrence that I should make a note of it in my diary there and then." This is one of the best substantiated instances on record, and one of the most interesting features in it is the form of the subject's dream, which does not show anything apparently clairvoyant, as phenom- ena of this kind often appear in the narratives after the event, but does show the transformation of a thought into a hallucination representing a perfectly definite coincidence, but not an exact replica of the facts. In another case a man alarmed the household by sitting up in bed and shouting as if in intense agony. Members of the family ran to the bedside and in- quired if he was ill, but he was found to be perfectly well and only dreaming. In the morning he seems to have remarked that he hoped that there was noth- ing wrong with his friend Barnes. By dinner-time a messenger arrived and told of the sudden death of Mr. Barnes more or less coincidentally with the dream. The next instance is a very pretty one in- volving coincidence with the thought of the person who can be presumed to be the agent. It involves an apparent representation of a coincident death which did not take place. " During our residence in India as missionaries, our children remained at home, either residing with my sister or at school, and about the years 1864) or 1865 our eldest boy was at school at Shireland Hall near Birmingham. The principal was the Rev. T, H. Morgan, now Baptist minister at Harrow-on-the-Hill. 168 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " One night, during the summer of one of the years I have mentioned, I was awakened from my sleep by my husband asking, ' What is the matter, J. ? Why are you weeping so ? I could let you sleep no longer, you were crying so much.' I replied that I was dreaming, but could not tell the dream for some minutes. It had seemed so like a reality that I was still weeping bitterly. " I dreamed that the sister (who acted as guardian to our boys in our absence) was reading to me a letter, giving a detailed account of how our Henry died of choking, while eating his dinner one day at school. " When sufficiently composed I again went to sleep ; but when I awoke in the morning, the effect of my dream was still upon me. My husband tried to rally me, saying, ' It is only a dream, think no more about it.' But my heart was sad, and I could not shake it off. " In the course of the day I called on a friend, the only other European lady in the station. I told her why I felt troubled, and she advised me to take a note of the date, and then I should know how to understand my dream when a letter of that date came to hand. Our letters at that time came to us via Southampton, and nearly six weeks must elapse before I could hear if anything had transpired on that particular date, even if a letter could have been dispatched at once; but it might not have been the ' mail day,' and that would give some additional days for me to wait. They were weary weeks, but at length the looked-for letter arrived, and it con- DREAMS 169 tained no reference to what I had anticipated. I felt truly ashamed that I had permitted a dream to influence me, and thought no more about it. " A fortnight later another letter from my sister came in, bearing an apology for not having told me in her last what a narrow escape from death our Harry had experienced, and then went on to detail what I had dreamed, with the additional piece of in- telligence that just as his head had dropped on the person supporting him, and he was supposed to be dead, the piece of meat passed down his throat, and he shortly revived, and was quite well at the time of her writing. " That boy is now a minister of the Gospel, and about a year ago I was talking with him about my strange dream, when a friend who was present said to him, ' Do you remember what you thought about when you were choking?' He replied, 'Yes, I dis- tinctly remember thinking I wonder what my mother will do when she hears I am dead.' " The husband confirms the story, and the son who had experienced the choking tells his thought at the time, and though it does not exactly tally with that reported of him by the mother, it shows that he was thinking of his mother. Another instance represents a man dreaming that he heard a cry of a woman calling for water, recog- nizing the voice of a woman who was in the hospital at the time. He named the woman at breakfast whose voice he heard. He then resolved to go and see the woman, and when he reached the door and was placing his hand on the latch to open it, he heard 170 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH a faint voice saying : " Will some kind Christian give me some water? " He got her the water. She died the same week. The dream is corroborated by the man's wife. Another instance has confirmation. " On the night of Saturday, the 11th of March, 1871 (recorded in 1884), I awoke in much alarm, having seen my eldest son, then at St. Paul de Loanda, on the southwest coast of Africa, looking dreadfully ill and emaciated, and I heard his voice distinctly calling me. I was so disturbed I could not sleep again, but every time I closed my eyes the ap- pearance recurred, and his voice sounded distinctly, calling me ' Mamma.' I felt greatly depressed all through the next day, which was Sunday, but I did not mention it to my husband, as he was an invalid, and I feared to disturb him. We were in the habit of receiving letters every Sunday from our youngest son, then in Ireland, and as none had come, I at- tributed my great depression to that reason, glad to have some cause to assign to Mr. Griffith rather than the real one. Strange to say, he also suffered from intense low spirits all day, and we were both unable to take dinner, he rising from the table say- ing, ' I don't care what it costs, I must have the boy back,' alluding to his eldest son. I mentioned my dream and the bad night I had had to two or three friends, but begged that they would say noth- ing of it to Mr. Griffith. The next day a letter arrived containing some photos of my son, saying he had had fever, but was better, and hoped imme- diately to leave for a much more health]^ station, and written in good spirits. We heard no more DREAMS 171 until the 9th of May, when a letter arrived with the news of our son's death from a fresh attack of fever, on the night of the 11th of March, and adding that just before his death he kept calling repeatedly for me. I did not at first connect the date of my son's death with that of my dream until reminded of it by the friends, and also an old servant, to whom I had told it at the time." The incidents are confirmed by the old servant named and the date of the death by the letter con- taining the information. Professor Royce, of Harvard University, was chairman of the American Committee on coinci- dental experiences in the early period of the Amer- ican Society, and made a report on these phenomena collected in this country. Of his collection he re- gards twenty-two cases as pseudo-presentiments^ which, perhaps, would be better understood by the term illusions of memory. But he gives fifty-four instances which he regards as coincidental, that is, as representing events not known in any normal manner at the time. They are not all dream coin- cidences, some being waking phenomena. Whether they involve a causal relation in this representation may be a question, but there was a coincidence in them. It is possible that the twenty-two cases classi- fied as pseudo-presentiments were also coincidental, but the evidence was apparently not good enough to guarantee this, and hence it may have been better not to advance a positive hypothesis of mnemonic illu- sion without definite evidence that it applied. A judgment of non-evidential might have been the safer 172 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH position. But I shall assume that either this view or that of Professor Royce is the true one for this class, and proceed to those which he regards as evi- dential of coincidence, involving the possibility of some unusual cause. The first instance was subjected to a most careful investigation for flaws by Professor Royce, and he found it strong in veridical probabilities. It would require too much space to quote details. I shall leave the reader to his report for these and merely give the person's experience. " I have not heard of you for an age. The train that should have been here Friday last has not ar- rived yet (w^ritten Wednesday at St. John, N. B.). I had a very strange dream on Tuesday night. I have never been in Ottawa in my life, and yet I was there, in Mr. E.'s house. Mrs. E. and the little girls were in great trouble because Mr. E. was ill. I had to go and tell my brother (Mr. E.'s son-in-law), and, strange to say, he was down a coal mine. " When I got to him I told him that Mr. E. was dead. But in trying to get out we could not do it. We climbed and climbed, but always fell back. I felt tired out when I awoke next morning, and I cannot account for the dream in any way." Inquiry showed that Mr. E. died that same night about midnight in Ottawa, and that it was normally impossible for the writer of this letter to have known it in any normal way. Another instance reported by a physician indicates a coincidence of some interest. " On the evening of the 29th of June, 1888 (re- corded in October of same year), my wife became I DREAMS 173 hysterical for the first time, to my knowledge, dur- ing seven years' marriage. She had a paroxysm of weeping, almost violent, fearing some unknown dis- aster to some member of her family in France. This lasted about half an hour. On the 7th of July there was a similar attack. " A letter, bearing date of the 29th of June, an- nounced the serious sudden illness (apoplexy), al- ready of several days duration, of her father, and announced his demise on July 6th." The letter announcing the illness of the lady's father was received on July 10th, and that of his death on July S8th. A most interesting case was fortunately recorded on the morning of its occurrence. The documents were preserved. " A curious coincidence occurred this morning (April 27th, 1888), which I report immediately. " A young woman in our household. North Irish by birth, Mary B., said early this morning that she had had a bad dream in the night. Her mistress, an elderly lady and an invalid, in whose room Mary B. sleeps, complained of being very restless in the early part of the night, and of having unpleasant dreams, but she slept soundly later on. Mary B. then got to sleep, too, when her dream occurred. She says she saw distinctly the sister of her mis- tress — whom she has not seen in a year, and then only in a passing sort of way — standing on the threshold of the door, in a long black gown and her hands folded in front of her. Mary B. related this as soon as she rose in the morning to a member of 174 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the family, and said impressively, ' I am sure some- thing is going to happen.' A half -hour later, the door-bell rang and the messenger handed in a tele- gram, wliich was brought to me directly. (Mary B. was then up-stairs, and knew nothing of it for some hours after.) The telegram stated that Mrs. D., of , had been taken suddenly ill and was not ex- pected to live. This was the lady (the sister of her mistress) whom Mary B. had seen in the night." Inquiry showed that it was between 11 and 12 o'clock that Mary B. noticed the restlessness of her mistress, and that it was about 2 in the morning that Mary B. had her dream. The telegram announc- ing the sudden illness of Mrs. D. came at 8 a. m., and one of her death six hours later, 2 p. m. Mrs. D. was in delicate health, but that she was in danger of a serious attack seems not to have been known. The author of the narrative added in reply to in- quiry also that this Mary B. repeatedly had dreams of this character, and tells one of them. " About four months ago, she had a similar dream concern- ing her father, an old man in Ireland, the news of whose death arrived about a fortnight after." Whatever explanation be supposed of this, as all others, whether it be a chance coincidence or some extraneous cause, it has borne critical examination as against ordinary illusions. The next is also from a good source. I shall ab- breviate it and content myself with the statement that its credentials are unusually good. A gentleman lost his only sister in St. Louis in 1867. In 1876 he was in St. Joseph, same State, DREAMS 175 finishing up some orders as a travelling agent. While at his desk, writing his orders and smoking a cigar, he saw an apparition of this sister and noted a peculiar scar on her right cheek. When the man told his experience at home in Boston, on his return, his father ridiculed him ; but the mother rose trem- bling and nearly fainted away ; as soon as she suf- ficiently recovered her self-possession, with tears streaming down her face she stated that while doing some little act of kindness to the daughter's body she unintentionally scratched her face at that spot and obliterated all traces of it with a powder, and never told any one of the fact until that day. The son seems never to have known the fact. The chief interest in this incident is not only the coincidence, but the form that it takes. We cannot admit for a moment that a discamate soul should have a scar produced on the body after death, and hence we find, as in other cases, that the coincidence is between facts known to living minds. Instances like these could be related indefinitely. But I shall summarize those on record by saying that these are samples of 150 similar instances, with- out mentioning what are called " borderland " cases, which represent the experience as occurring between the waking state and sleep, and so not classifiable ex- actly with dreams. Of this borderland type there are 108 cases mentioned in the work quoted, the Phantasms of the Living. There are many such put on record since, but not yet published. The collec- tion is probably a small part of the whole number that have actually occurred in such experiences. 176 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Even these instances can hardly be due to chance coincidence, especially when certain complex details are involved. But whatever may be said of these, the most inter- esting class, so far as chance coincidence is concerned, is what is called collective cases. These are cases in which two or more percipients have the same ex- perience at the same time indicative of a knowledge of the same event at a distance. It will be more natural for the sceptically inclined mind to dispute the objective significance of such cases as I have narrated, but it will not be so easy to discredit the collective cases on the same grounds. I shall quote some instances of this type from the Phantasms of the Living, A gentleman had a servant, Susan by name, who was taken to the hospital ill. It was seven miles dis- tant. " During Saturday night," says a Mr. Mathews, " the following mystery occurred, which has ever since been a puzzle to myself. Being asleep, I was awakened with or by a sudden feeling of terror. I stared through the darkness of the bedroom, but could not see anything, but felt overcome by an un- natural horror or dread, and covered myself with the bedclothes, regularly scared. My room door was in a narrow passage, leading to my mother's room, and any one passing would almost touch the door. I passed the remaining portion of the night in rest- lessness. In the morning I met my mother on com- ing down-stairs, and observed that she looked ill and pale, and most unusually depressed. I asked, ' What's the matter .? ' She replied, ' Nothing ; DREAMS 177 don't ask me.' An hour or two passed, and I still saw that something was amiss, and I felt determined to know the cause, and mj mother seemed equally bent on not satisfying me. At last I said, ' Has it anything to do with Susan? ' She burst into tears and said, 'What makes you ask that question .f^' I then told her my scare during the night, and she then related to me the following strange story, " ' I was awakened by the opening of my bedroom door, and saw, to my horror, Susan enter in her night-dress. She came straight towards my bed, turned down the clothes, and laid herself beside me, and I felt a cold chill all down my side where she seemed to touch me. I suppose I fainted, as I lost all recollection for some time, and when I came to myself the apparition had gone — but of one thing I am sure, and that is that it was not a dream.'' " We heard by the village woman on her return Sunday evening, that Susan died in the middle of the night, and that previous to becoming unconscious her whole talk was about ' returning to Troston Hall.' We had no apprehension whatever of the death. We thought she had gone to the hospital, not because she was in danger, but for the sake of special treatment." In another instance a lady, Mrs. W., sailed for America and took smallpox in Boston and died. This was about the last of November or the first of December. About twenty-four hours after her death and some time before the death was announced by letter, the deceased lady's sister-in-law, residing in London, England, tells the following experience. 178 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " About the end of November, or the beginning of December, in the same year (1872), I was disturbed one morning before it was Hght, as near as may be between 5 and 6 a. m., by the appearance of a tall figure, in a long dress, bending over the bed. I distinctly recognized this figure to be no other than my sister-in-law, Mrs. W., who, as I felt, distinctly touched me. My husband, who was beside me asleep at the time, neither saw nor felt anything. " This appearance was also made to an aged aunt, residing at this time at They don Bois, near Epping, Essex. She told my husband as recently as the 4th inst. (1885), that the appearance came to her in the form of a bright light from a dark corner of her bedroom in the early morning. It was so dis- tinct that she not only recognized her niece, Mrs. W., but she actually noticed the needlework on her long night-dress ! This appearance was also made to my husband's half-sister, at that time unmarried, and residing at Stanhope Gardens. The last-named was the first to receive the announcement of the death of Mrs. W., in a letter from the widower, dated December (day omitted), 1872, from 156 Eighth Street, South Boston, still preserved.'* Here are three persons who seem to have had the same coincidental apparition, and the truthfulness of the personal narratives is vouched for by the husband of the lady, Mrs. Coote, who writes it. The next one is perhaps more interesting still, as it in- volves, according to the circumstances of the narra- tive, no comparison of experiences before the identity of the reference has been established. DREAMS 179 " The first instance occurred when I was in Shang- hai. It was the month of May, 1854 (recorded in 1885). The night was very warm, and I was in bed, lying on my back, wide awake, contemplating the dangers by which we were then surrounded, from a threatened attack by the Chinese. I gradually became av/are there was something in the room; it appeared like a thin, white fog, a misty vapor, hang- ing about the foot of the bed. Fancying it was merely the effect of a moonbeam, I took but little notice, but after a few moments I plainly distin- guished a figure which I recognized as that of my sister Fanny. At first the expression of her face was sad, but it changed to a sweet smile, and she bent her head towards me as if she recognized me. I was too much fascinated with the appearance to speak, although it did not cause me the slightest fear. The vision seemed to disappear gradually in the same manner as it came. We afterwards learned that on the same day my sister died — almost sud- denly. I immediately wrote a full description of what I had seen to my sister, Mrs. Elmslie (the wife of the consul at Canton), but before it reached her, I had received a letter from her, giving me an almost similar description of what she had seen the same night, adding, ' I am sure dear Fanny is gone.' When this occurred, we [^. e. Mr. de Guerin and Mrs. Elmslie] were upwards of one thousand miles apart, and neither of us had a thought of her being seriously, much less dangerously, ill. Before her death she had spoken of us both to those around her SSL 180 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH bedside. She died in Jersey (England), on the 30th May, 1854, between 10 and 11 at night." These are samples of collective cases, and they are chosen from a list of forty-eight similar cases. One of them, the best extant and on record, is too long to quote, but it has the support of three intelligent persons as to the occurrence and the coincidence. Two of these are General Re3rnardson and Dr. G. Crichton. But I shall not quote further. What I have given suffices to indicate the character of the collective instances, and we have only the question of the credibility and judgment of the witnesses to decide in order to determine the importance of the alleged facts. The collection of them represents forty-eight cases, a very large number, considering the complications which must necessarily accompany such phenomena. When it comes to offering an explanation of these coincidences I think our first duty is to ask whether they may possibly be due to chance. It has, of course, been usual to refer them to telepathy, and the authors of the Phantasms of the Living think that they " may reasonably be regarded as tele- pathic." To approach such a classification of them they had to consider the question of chance coinci- dence, and I think that we may safely repudiate such an explanation as impossible, unless we had a census of experiences like them which did not prove coin- cidental, and which was large enough to make chance in these plausible. Excluding chance from them, I think the best way to indicate their nature is to regard them as at least pointing toward an extra- DREAMS 181 organic cause of a supernormal sort. Whether they are telepathic or initiated by some other agency may remain an open question. But I think that they at least indicate an extra-organic cause distinct from the intra-organic stimuli, peripheral or central, and also distinct from normal extra-organic stimuli. We may introduce all the hallucinatory elements we please into the result, — and they are apparently present in some of them, — yet they represent such reference to events at a distance that we can hardly refuse them a supernormal cause of some kind, and so may have a right to assume that experiences, sub- jectively like internally initiated states, may have a foreign source, and it would remain to investigate this cause more carefully. That they may be telepathic is apparently sup- ported by the peculiar character of some of them, representing the thoughts of persons at a distance, and not a corresponding physical event. Take the case of the dream in which a lady's son appeared to have died from choking. The death did not take place, but the boy had the choking fit, and seems to have actually thought of his mother. The reader may notice that a number of the instances represent this sort of characteristics, and they were quoted purposely to call attention to the fact. No one can obviously insist that the coincidences of this kind have an explanation necessarily in discamate agency, since the incidents are not evidence of such influences. They, on the contrary, seem to support a direct connection between living minds, and we should most naturally resort to something like telepathy as the 182 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH more plausible hypothesis, though we should require experimental evidence to justify even this applica- tion of it, and I think this evidence is illustrated in the previous chapter. The most interesting circumstance, however, is the fact that most of the coincidences relate to the con- temporary illness or death of a certain person, and that the number of the coincidences is much greater for the dream-life than for the waking state. The spontaneous coincidences of the waking state are much less numerous than those of sleep, and in nearly all cases they are in some way related to crit- ical moments of some kind, and mostly of severe ill- nesses and death. Probably we should find in the end that the large majority of them are death coin- cidences, and this fact alone gives them an extraor- dinary interest, though we may have to prosecute our inquiries much further before venturing upon an hypothesis to explain this peculiar feature of them. Superficially, however, they open an inquiry of vast proportions, and if for no other reason than for protection against erroneous interpretation of them, they make careful investigation imperative. CHAPTER VII APPARITIONS An intelligent public cannot restrain a smile when a man begins to talk seriously of " ghosts." The topic in all respectable quarters is a subject for humor and mirth. The reason for this is not far to seek. We have escaped the superstitions of an- tiquity and the middle ages. A very slight ac- quaintance with those periods reveals the most ex- traordinary and incredible stories about the visita- tions of departed spirits. It would be a useless and perhaps a thankless task here to detail any of the conceptions maintained by early civilizations, as they have little but an antiquarian interest for all but the psychic researcher. Besides it would take up too much space, and I must content myself with the bare fact that apparitions are phenomena which are older than the recent investigations into their real or al- leged meaning. I have one precaution to indicate for the reader, and that is, that we are not obliged to respect the public's attitude in such matters in our demand for scientific examination of either the fact or the belief In " ghosts." The public is usually interested in the sensational or the humorous side of the matter, and the scientific mind in the explanation of facts 183 184 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH regardless of the question whether they have any bearing at all upon the reality of events alleg- ing a source outside the person experiencing them. There are reasons enough for recognizing the healthi- ness of popular scepticism about apparitions without assuming that its conceptions of the issues involved are correct. If the phenomena laying claim to be- ing " ghosts " or apparitions were no better sup- ported than are the stories of antiquity and the middle ages we might well disregard them, but we are so familiar with the phenomena in our asylums that we can easily distinguish between their value for reality and their importance for psychiatry or abnormal psychology. If we knew no more about the mind than did our ancestors we might well feel uncanny at such stories as once obtained credence, but we are so familiar with illusions, hallucinations, and the products of the imagination that we are not disposed to take seriously the accounts of hysterical people in the matter of apparitions. I think, however, we may be able to impress some scientific men and more intelligent laymen, who have scientific and ethical impulses, to examine persistent stories which affect human belief for good or ill, and to bring them under such surveillance as will enable us to guide the less intelligent into accurate opinions on such phenomena. I beseech no other in- terest here in the attempt to examine seriously the allegations of men from time immemorial. While I shall vie with any one in the humorous aspects of such a question, I shall not waste my time trying to prove my sanity on the subject by indulging wit APPARITIONS 185 or humor about it. There are better reasons in this unsettled age and in the vagaries of many people for examining the phenomena and for reducing them to some intelligible order, even though that be only one of systematic delusion. An apparition or " ghost," at least in the popular mind, is supposed to represent a departed spirit, and so claims to be more than a product of fancy. It is supposed to have the same reahty, though of a different kind, spiritual as distinct from physical, as the external objects which affect our senses. But we have found so many alleged cases of this vanish- ing into the limbo of illusion and dreams that we are rightly chary of admitting any objective reality for their appearance unless credentials very different from such as we usually find are produced to make them credible. As illustrations of credible experiences that can be proved to have no such reality as popular credulity assigns them I may narrate the following incidents, coming from excellent authorities. James Beattie, the poet and philosopher, whose sympathies might naturally have enlisted him in the support of the reality of apparitions, tells the fol- lowing interesting experiences, which show how quickly the popular conception vanishes when intelli- gent men tell their observations. " By the glimmering of the moon, I have once and again beheld, at midnight, the exact form of a man or woman, sitting silent and motionless by my bedside. Had I hid my head, without daring to look the apparition in the face, I should have passed 186 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the night in horror, and risen in the morning with the persuasion of having seen a ghost. But, rousing myself, and resolving to find out the truth, I dis- covered that it was nothing more than the acci- dental disposition of my clothes upon a chair. Once I remember to have been alarmed at seeing, by the faint light of the dawn, a coffin laid out between my bed and window. I started up, and recollecting that I had heard of such things having been seen by others, I set myself to examine it, and found it was only a stream of yellowish light, falling in a particular manner upon the floor, from between the window curtains. And so lively was the appearance, that, after I was thoroughly satisfied of the cause, it continued to impose on my sight as before, till the increased light of the morning dispelled it. These facts are perhaps too trivial to be recorded; but they serve to show that free inquiry, with a very small degree of fortitude, may sometimes, when one is willing to be rational, prove a cure to certain dis- eases of the imagination." Doctor Carpenter quotes a narrative from Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft, giv- ing the experience of that author while " engaged in reading with much interest, after the death of Lord B^^ron, an account of his habits and opinions." The narrative is written in the third person. " Passing from his sitting-room into the entrance- hall, fitted up with the skins of wild beasts, armor, etc., he saw right before him, and in a standing pos- ture, the exact representation of his departed friend ^(Byron), whose recollection had been so strongly APPARITIONS 187 brought to his imagination. He stopped for a sin- gle moment, so as to notice the wonderful accuracy with which fancy had impressed upon the bodily eye the peculiarities of dress and posture of the illus- trious poet. Sensible, however, of the delusion, he felt no sentiment save that of wonder at the extraor- dinary accuracy of the resemblance ; and stepped onwards towards the figure, which resolved itself, as he approached, into the various materials of which it was composed. These were merely a screen occupied by greatcoats, shawls, plaids, and such other articles as are usually found in a country entrance-hall. Sir Walter returned to the spot from which he had seen this product of what may be called imagination proper, and tried with all his might to recall it by force of will, but in vain.'' Doctor Tuke mentions a case quoted by Doctor Carpenter, It is the case of an apparition of an ape, and seems also to have been a collective one, that is, seen simultaneously by more than one person. The instance would be inconceivable but for the authority from which it comes and from the report of Leon Marillier on the apparition of the Virgin at Dordogne, in France, where a large number of people, evidently influenced by suggestion, seem to have had an apparition of the Virgin after a little girl of neurotic character reported her experience in seeing the same in a grotto. But I return to Doctor Tuke's instance, so extraordinary that we may well feel justified in scepticism of the truth of the story, without having any temptations to treat it even as seriously as an hallucination. 188 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " During the conflagration at the Crystal Palace in the winter of 1866 - 67, when the animals were dcstro3'ed by the fire, it was supposed that the chim- panzee had succeeded in escaping from his cage. Attracted to the roof, with this expectation in full force, men saw the unhappy animal holding on to it, and writhing in agony to get astride one of the iron ribs. It need not be said that its struggles were watched by those below with breathless suspense, and, as the newspapers informed us, ' with sickening dread.' But there was no animal whatever there; and all this feeling was thrown away upon a tattered piece of blind, so torn as to resemble, to the eyes of fancy, the bod3^, arms, and legs of an ape." Dr. Hibbert mentions an interesting case in his Treatise on ApparitionSy and it is a fine sailor's story. " A whole ship's company was thrown into the utmost consternation, by the apparition of a cook who had died a few days before. He was distinctly seen walking ahead of the ship, with a peculiar gait by which he was distinguished when alive, through having one of his legs shorter than the other. On steering the ship towards the object, it was found to be a piece of floating wreck." I take a more recent instance recorded by Pro- fessor Sorlc}^ in the Census of Halhwinat'ionSy pub- lished by the Society for Psychical Research, under the signatures of Professor Sidgwick, Mr. F. W. H. Myers, Miss Johnson, IMr. Podmore, and Mrs. Sidg- wick. " Lying in bed," says Professor Sorley, " facing the window, and opening my eyes voluntarily in order APPARITIONS 189 to drive away the imagery of an unpleasant dream which was beginning to revive, I saw the figure of a man, some three or four feet distant from my head, standing perfectly still by the bedstead, so close to it that the bedclothes seemed slightly pushed towards me by his leg pressing against them. The image was perfectly distinct — height about five feet eight inches, sallow complexion, grey eyes, greyish mustache, short and bristly, and apparently recently clipped. His dress seemed like a dark grey dress- ing-gown, tied with a dark red rope. " My first thought was, ' That's a ghost ; ' my second, ' It may be a burglar whose designs upon my watch are interrupted by my opening my eyes.' I bent forward towards him, and the image vanished. " As the image vanished, my attention passed to a shadow on the wall, twice or three times the dis- tance off, and perhaps twelve feet high. There was a gas lamp in the mews-lane outside, which shed a light through the lower twelve inches or so of the (first floor) window, over which the blind had not been completely drawn, and the shadow was cast by the curtain hanging beside the window. The soli- tary bit of color in the image — the red rope of the dressing-gown — was immediately identified with the twisted mahogany handle of the dressing-table, which was in the same line of vision as part of the shadow." I shall relate one more because it was so carefully examined, and its illusory nature so clearly deter- mined. It is by a lady. One evening at dusk I went into my bedroom to (( 190 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH fetch something I wanted off the mantelpiece. A street lamp threw a slanting ray of light in at the window, just sufficient to enable me to discern the dim outline of the chief articles of furniture in the room. I was cautiously feeling for what I wanted when, partially turning round, I perceived at a short distance behind me a figure of a Httle old lady, sitting very sedately with her hands folded in her lap, holding a white pocket-handkerchief. I was much startled, for I had not before seen any one in the room, and called out, ' Who's that.? ' but received no answer, and, turning quite round to face my vis- itor, she immediately vanished from sight. ' Well,' I thought, ' this is strange ! ' I had left all the rest of the household down-stairs ; it was hardly possible that any one could have followed me into the room without my being aware of it, and besides, the old lady was quite different from any one I had ever seen. Being very near-sighted, I began to think my eyes had played me a trick ; so I resumed my search in as nearly as possible the same position as before, and having succeeded, was turning to come away, when lo ! and behold ! there sat the little old lady as distinct as ever, with her funny little cap, dark dress, and hands folded demurely over her white handkerchief. This time I turned round quickly and marched up to the apparition, which vanished as suddenly as before. And now being convinced that no one was playing me any trick, I determined to find out, if possible, the why and because of the mystery. Slowly resuming my former position by the fireplace, and again percei^dng the figure, I APPARITIONS 191 moved my head slightly from side to side, and found that it did the same, I then went slowly backwards, keeping my head still until I reached the same place, when deliberately turning round the mystery was solved. " A small, polished mahogany stand near the window, which I used as a cupboard for various trifles, made the body of the figure, a piece of paper hanging from the partly open door serving as the handkerchief; a vase on the top formed the head and dress, and the slanting light falling upon it and the white curtain of the window completed the illusion. I destroyed and remade the figure several times, and was surprised to find how distinct it ap- peared when the exact relative positions were main- tained." Both these instances involved that kind of investi- gation by the subjects of them that is necessary to prove the character of any experience of the kind. They are not such as can be merely explained by the hypothesis of hallucination, but they are proved hallucinations or illusions. They are evidentially supported, and would not stand the examination for any other than a subjective reality. There are sev- eral other similar instances which I shall not quote. I have given sufficient to show what the scientific man will be on the alert for before he admits any other meaning than hallucination for similar expe- riences. If any story of an apparition Is told it must pre- sent certain credentials to give it more than a hallu- cinatory character ; that is, more than a merely sub- 192 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH jective creation, peripherally or centrally initiated. There are at least two circumstances which must be proved regarding such experiences to give them what is called a veridical nature, that is, a definite causal connection with external reality not normally perceived. They are (1) that the experience shall coincide with a corresponding event at such a dis- tance as precludes normal sensory perception, and (2) the subject of the experience must not have known at the time the event represented. Without the fulfilment of these conditions such experiences cannot escape the objection that they are hallucina- tions. But if a sufficient number of coincidental ap- paritions occurs, having such credentials as I have indicated, the question of their extra-organic ini- tiation will become as serious a problem as that of coincidental dreams. Now it happens that there is a large number of such experiences, and the first question is whether they are due to chance. This cannot be determined until we know the facts of the case and the details of the experiences. Prior to illustrating them I shall classify them with reference to the difficulties in explaining them. The scepticism of their veridi- cal nature is so obstinate, and possibly justly so, that we must take the phenomena in the types which suggest less doubt as to their source. No one hesi- tates about such as I have illustrated, and only when a claim to the supernormal origin of some of them is put forward, whether by telepathy or other agen- cies, do men stand stolidly for the sceptical view regarding the facts. If, however, we can find well-- APPARITIONS 193 authenticated instances of apparitions that do not represent departed spirits we may obtain a hearing. Such would be phantasms of the hving. Fortunately we have instances of this type. Then there is a type coinciding with the deaths of the persons repre- sented, and lastly there are those involving the ap- pearance of persons who have been deceased for a longer or shorter period. I can classify them briefly, as (1) Apparitions of the Living, (2) Apparitions of the Dying, and (3) Apparitions of the Dead. 1. Apparitions of the Living As I have already hinted, the sceptic cannot pro- duce against alleged apparitions of the living the same objections which he inclines to use against al- leged cases of the dead. The doubts about personal survival after death, or the suspicions created and sustained by a long history of scientific criticism of alleged spiritistic phenomena, start objections to " ghost " stories so determined that it is impossible to secure even the consideration of the evidence for even a more natural theory of the facts. But these prejudices cannot be invoked against phantasms or apparitions of the living. The question is, do such phenomena occur, not what explanation of them is possible. Of this last we can speak, if we can assure ourselves that they occur in sufficient numbers to exclude chance coincidence from their explanation. The primary problem in such cases is to establish an actual coincidence between the apparition and the event at a distance which it is supposed to represent. 194 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH It is the fact of significant coincidence, not the mode of it, that first requires proof, and this result can be achieved only by such a number of them evi- dentially sustained as will force conviction precisely as did stories of falling meteors. Of this first class I shall proceed to give such illustrations as have re- ceived proper record and examination to give them some sort of respectable authenticity. The primary interest of such cases is that they possess a verifiable character, which consists in the establishment of the extraneous event to which the subject's experience corresponds. We do not always have to rely upon the testimony of a single person for the integrity of the story. Often two parties at least can attest the coincidence, or each the fact which helps to fix the coincidence. The ordinary objections to the truthfulness of such narratives do not apply, and scepticism will have to accuse the persons concerned of conspiracy or resort to the theory of chance. Scepticism has its rights unless these conditions are fulfilled. In selecting my instances I shall first take a type which may supposably be due to expectancy or sug- gestion, and follow these up with various cases of both spontaneous and experimental character. Those possibly due to expectancy or suggestion are selected from the Census of Hallucinations, made by the Society for Psychical Research and signed by the persons mentioned above. The first instance was indorsed by the subject of the experience, but writ- ten out by the collector of the Society. " This happened in 1870, when Mrs. E. was aged APPARITIONS 195 forty. She was sitting in the drawing-room of the hotel overlooking a park, and was waiting for her husband to take her down to dinner. The drawing- room was open, and from her seat Mrs. E. had a view of part of the staircase and the intervening hall or passage. He delayed coming, so Mrs. E. ever and anon kept glancing towards the door and out into the hall beyond. At last one time she imagined she saw him turn a bend in the staircase and come slowly along the corridor. Keeping her eyes all the time on what she thought was her husband approaching her with a well-known smile, Mrs. E. rose and crossed the room till she stood, as she thought, opposite her husband, when the spectre vanished before her eyes. She was in good health at this time. In about half an hour afterwards, her husband, detained un- avoidably, did veritably come into the room." This instance is not coincidental, inasmuch as it does not show the corresponding external incident in the husband's mind or actions to make it have that character. It does illustrate, however, the fact that a living person can be represented in an ap- parition under circumstances of expectation, so that coincidental cases must be free from that influence to have a supernormal explanation. I am concerned at present mainly with the fact that phantasms of the Hving occur, regardless of the question whether they coincide with certain significant events at a dis- tance. I therefore give a few non-coincidental cases. " In the year 1883, I was studying music, and used to practise alone frequently in the evening. Towards the autumn of that year, on one occasion, I felt 196 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH some one touch me, and on looking round I saw the figure of a gentleman whom I knew. He was dressed in black clothes, with the collar of his coat buttoned closely round his neck, showing no white collar. As I looked he faded away. This occurred on three different occasions. I was in perfect health at the time, and in no trouble or anxiety. I had not seen the gentleman for about two years before that occur- rence, and have no idea what he was doing at the time. The two first occasions were exactly alike." The next incident associates the apparition with a noise actually made by the person seen. " The most distinct hallucination that I remember was one which occurred to me one day in January, 1891 (recorded soon after). I heard a friend (whose footstep I recognized) coming into this house, cross the hall outside the room in which I was standing, and up-stairs. At the same time that I distinctly heard her going up-stairs after having crossed the hall, I saw her in the room where I was. The room opens into the hall. I only saw her for a second or two; and she had not on her hat and jacket as she would naturally have had com- ing from a walk, but was dressed as she usually is in the house. The appearance vanished almost at once. I was startled by it, and when my friend came down I told her what I had seen, explaining that it must have been the sound of her step out- side which caused the appearance. I had also just come in from a walk, and was talking to other people in the sitting-room. I was not out of health nor in anxiety of any kind." •'^ APPARITIONS 197 Another instance shows that investigation confirms the apparitional nature of the experience as dis- tinct from an illusion caused by the sight of some one present. " At my grandmother's house, Albemarle Co., Vir- ginia, at about 11 p. m., my cousin. Miss S., some- what older than I, and myself, had been convers- ing in the parlor. She left me. The house door opening into the parlor stood open, the night being warm, and the moonlight streamed in over the floor beside me as I sat, leaning on the sofa arm, my back to the entrance. The shadow of a human form fell on the moonlit floor. Half -turning my head I saw a tall woman dressed in white back of me. By the contour and the gleam of the plaits round her head I recognized my cousin, and deemed she had doff"ed her black dress to try a white one. I ad- dressed an ordinary remark to her. She did not reply and I turned right round upon her. Then she went out of the door down the entrance steps, and as she disappeared I wondered I had heard noth- ing of a step or the rustle of her dress. I sat and puzzled over this, though without taking fright, for a few minutes. I was unoccupied, ruminating quietly ; in robust health ; completely awake ; un- troubled ; age sixteen years about. It was, I felt convinced, though I did not see her face, my cousin. I am short-sighted, but fully believed I saw my cousin. She had shortly before left the room by the inner door. She lived there. I was familiar with the sight of her. I was alone for about half an hour. I then sought my cousin and found her in the other 198 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH sitting-room with mj grandmother. I said, ' I thought you had changed your dress.' She said, ' No, I have not.' I asked, ' Didn't you come to the house door just now.^^ ' She said, ' I've been with grandmother the last half -hour, — since I left you.' I then grew frightened and went up to the only other two inmates, at that hour, of the house. These two (females) denied that they had been down-stairs during the interval. The negro slaves had all gone to their (outside) quarters for the night." These suffice for non-coincidental apparitions which are, of course, attributed to ordinary hallu- cination, and they are narrated only to show that apparitions of living persons are possible, whether having a normal or a supernormal interpretation. If telepathy be a fact we shall have no difficulty in recognizing the possibility of apparitions represent- ing living people in the same way as mere hallucina- tions. I turn, therefore, to coincidental cases, what- ever the explanation of them. I shall refer first to one already quoted in the chapter on telepathy. It is the case in which a man's wife appeared to him in mauve dress, she being alive and well and at some distance from home (p. 107). This instance, the reader will remember, was well corroborated. The next instance is told by Mr. Myers in his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, and is especially good in its evidential aspects. It is quoted from Phantasms of the Living. " In the autumn of 1877, while at Sholebrooke Lodge, Towcester, Northamptonshire, one night, at a little after ten o'clock, I remember I was about to APPARITIONS 199 move a lamp in my room to a position where I usu- ally sat a little while before retiring to bed, when I suddenly saw a vision of my brother. It seemed to affect me like a mild shock of electricity. It sur- prised me so that I hesitated to carry out what I had intended, my eyes remaining fixed on the appari- tion of my brother. It gradually disappeared, leav- ing me wondering what it meant. I am positive no light or reflection deceived me. I had not been sleeping or rubbing my eyes. I was again in the act of moving the lamp when I heard taps along the window. I looked towards it — the window was on the ground floor — and heard a voice, my brother's, say, ' It's I, don't be frightened.' I let him in ; he remarked, ' How cool you are ! I thought I should have frightened you.' " The fact was, that the distinct vision of my brother had quite prepared me for his call. He found the window by accident, as he had never been to the house before ; to use his own words, ' I thought it was your window, and that I should find you.' He had unexpectedly left London to pay me a visit, and when near the house lost his way, and had found his way in the dark to the back of the place." The next instance represents a trivial circum- stance, and is an apparition only of the hands and a letter, but it is so well confirmed in its essential points that it must be quoted. It is also quoted by Mr, Myers from Phantasms of the Living. " [Mr. Gottschalk begins by describing a friend- ship which he formed with Mr. Courtenay Thorpe, at the rooms of Dr. Sylvian Mayer, on the evening SOO ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH of February 20th, 1885. On February 24th, being anxious to hear a particular recitation which Mr. Thorpe was shortly going to give, Mr. Gottschalk wrote to him, at Prince's Theatre, to ask what the hour of the recitation was to be.] In the evening I was going out to see some friends, when on the road there seemed suddenly to develop itself before me a disc of light, which appeared to be on a different plane to everything else in view. It was not possible for me to fix the distance at which it seemed to be from me. Examining the illumined space, I found that two hands were visible. They were engaged in drawing a letter from an envelope which I in- stinctively felt to be mine and, in consequence, thought immediately that the hands were those of Mr. Thorpe. I had not previously been thinking of him, but at the moment the conviction came to me with such intensity that it was irresistible. Not being in any way awestruck by the extraordinary nature and novelty of this incident, but in a per- fectly calm frame of mind, I examined the picture, and found that the hands were very white, and bared up to some distance above the wrist. Each forearm terminated in a ruffle; beyond that nothing was to be seen. The vision lasted about a minute. After its disappearance I determined to find out what connection it may have had with Mr. Thorpe's actual pursuit at the moment, and went to the nearest lamp- post and noted the time. " By the first post the next morning, I received an answer from Mr. Thorpe, which began in the following way : ' Tell me, pray tell me, why did I, APPARITIONS 201 when I saw your letter in the rack at Prince's Thea- tre, know that it was from you? ' [We have seen this letter, which is dated ' Tuesday night ; ' and February 24th, 1885, fell on a Tuesday.] Mr. Thorpe had no expectation of receiving a letter from me, nor had he ever seen my writing. Even had he seen it, his knowledge of it would not affect the issue of the question, as he assured me that the im- pression arrived the moment he saw there was a letter under the ' T clip,' before any writing was visible. [Mr. Gottschalk explains that from the con- struction of the rack, which he examined, the address on the envelope would be invisible.] " On the evening of February 27th, by arrange- ment, I again met him at the rooms of Dr. Mayer, and there put questions to him with a view to eliciting some explanation. As near as possible, I give them as they were put at the time, and add the answers. It is necessary for me here to state that he and the Doctor were in complete ignorance of what had hap- pened to me. Having impressed upon him the neces- sity of answering in a categorical manner and with the greatest possible accuracy, I commenced : — " ' When did you get my Tuesday's letter .^^ ' * At 7 in the evening, when I arrived at the theatre.' ' Then what happened ? ^ '1 read it, but, being very late, in such a hurry that when I had finished I was as ignorant of its contents as if I had never seen it.' ' Then.^^ ' ' I dressed, went on the stage, played my part, and came off.' ' What was the time then.? ' ' About 20 minutes past 8.' ' What happened then.? ' ' I talked for a time with some of the com- '^*'*"*' g02 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH pany in my dressing-room.' ' For how long? ' 'Twenty minutes.' 'What did you then do.'*' ' They having left me my first thought was to find your letter. I looked everywhere for it, in vain. I turned out the pockets of my ordinary clothes, and searched among the many things that encum- bered my dressing-table. I was annoyed at not finding it immediately, especially as I was anxious to know what it was about. Strangely enough I dis- covered it eventually in the coat which I had just worn in the piece " School for Scandal." I imme- diately read it again, was delighted to receive it, and decided to answer at once.' ' Now be very exact. What was the time when you read it on the second occasion?' 'As nearly as I can say, 10 minutes to 9.' " Thereupon I drew from my pocket a little diary in which I had noted the time of my vision, and asked Dr. Mayer to read what was written under the date of 24th February. " ' Eight minutes to 9.' " [Mr. Gottschalk has kindly allowed us to in- spect his diary, which confirms all the dates given.] " Having established in this way, without assist- ance, the coincidence of the time between his actually opening the envelope and my seeing him do so, I was satisfied as to the principal part, and proceeded to analyze the incident in detail. The whiteness of the hands was accounted for by the fact that actors invariably whiten their hands when playing a part like the one Mr. Thorpe was engaged in — ' Snake ' in the ' School for Scandal.' The ruffles also formed APPARITIONS 203 part of the dress in this piece. They were attached to the short sleeves of the shirt which Mr. Thorpe was actually wearing when he opened my letter. " This is the first hallucination I ever had. I have had one since of a similar nature, which I will recount separately." Dr. Mayer confirms the case so far as to say that he saw the note in diary and that it tallied almost exactly with Mr. Thorpe's statements. I quote one collective case well confirmed and re- ported in the Census of Hallucinations. The inci- dent is confirmed by the two sisters who had the experience and by the third sister who was the object of it. " I was playing the harmonium in the church of at about 4 p. m., August, 1889, when I saw my eldest sister walk up the church towards the chancel with a roll of papers under her arm. When I looked up again she had disappeared, and I thought she had just come in for a few minutes and gone out again ; but when I asked her afterwards what she wanted in the church, she was much surprised, and told me she had been in the rectory library all the afternoon, studying genealogical tables. " My eldest sister looked just as usual and wore her hat and jacket, as I and my younger sister both noticed. She walked rather briskly, looking straight before her. She assures us that she was sifting alone in the rectory library all the afternoon." The sister present and participant of the collective apparition writes as follows : — " My sisters and I were spending the day witK ^04 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH our uncle at ; as he is rector his garden leads into the churchyard. In the course of the afternoon C. and I went into the church; she began to play the harmonium and I stood on a stone coffin beside her with my hand on her shoulder; my sister was playing a hymn and I was looking down at the book to read the words. C. casually looked up ; I did the same, and following the direction of her eyes saw K. walking to us up the church with — and this rather surprised me — a long bundle of papers in her hand. We made no remark and took no further notice of her movements, for when we go to we often just wander in to see the church. It was certainly K. herself; I could see her face quite well. C. and I finished our hymn and found she had gone. C. and I soon after went in to tea. At tea we were surprised to hear K. say, ' I am sorry I did not see the church, but part of the afternoon I was looking at pedigrees in the study; before that I passed the church gate; I was going in, but turned back to the study instead,' or words to that effect. C. and I exchanged glances, but said nothing. However, next morning we attacked K. on the subject; she was much sur- prised, had certainly not been in the church, but had first been in the library studying the family pedigree, and then gone to the church gate and re- turned." K., the sister mentioned, gives the following ac- count of her doings : — " Upon the afternoon during which this curious incident happened, I wandered about my uncle's APPARITIONS 205 garden for awhile, and half thought of going into the church, but changed my mind and did not. I went into the library, and, being interested in gene- alogy, studied my uncle's family pedigree until tea- time, when I remarked to my sisters that I had not been to the church all the afternoon, and they told me that they had seen me there. I felt no unusual sensations during the afternoon, and am much mys- tified by the incident." The coincidence lies in the fact that the sister, K., had intended to go into the church and had not. Otherwise we might place the case among the non-coincidental instances, or as an illusion or hallu- cination suggested by some sensory impression in the church. The Census records five other collective cases much more striking in their incidents than this one and less exposed to ordinary explanations. I simply mention this type as affecting the problem of chance. There seems to be but few instances in which spontaneous apparitions of the living are coinci- dental and suggestive of the supernormal, when the parties are in their normal waking state. I have quoted the majority of those that I can find having any special interest. There seems to be, however, a larger number of experimental instances, and I shall quote them at some length. Dr. Elliotson, in the Zoist, mentioned a case in which a friend was able by his will, telepathic sug- gestion, but not so called at the time, to produce in another phantasms of those he was thinking of. Dr. Charpignon reports a similar phenomenon, and 206 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Dr. Dagonet, in the Annales Medico-P sychologiques, reports a case of this kind. The details of these, however, are not given, and Httle can be said of them except that they record coincidental phantasms whose explanation was not attempted. A Mr. Wesermann, in the Archiv fur den Thieri- schen Magnet'ismus, reports a series of experiments of his own in producing an apparition of himself at a distance. I quote the account, but shall not vouch for its trustworthiness. As the authors of the Fhan- tasms of the Living say : " To such a record, if it stood alone, we should attach very little importance, in default of any evidence as to the intellectual and moral trustworthiness of Wesermann." But as the phenomena are much like some of the instances quoted in reference to telepathy, they are no more incredible than these are, and besides they contain a few facts, which, if the sceptic of more striking facts will accept these, can be used against the spirit- istic hypothesis. " First Experiment at a Distance of Five Miles. I endeavored to acquaint my friend, the Hofkam- merath G. (whom I had not seen, with whom I had not spoken, and to whom I had not written, for thirteen years), with the fact of my intended visit, by presenting my form to him in his sleep, through the force of my will. When I went to him on the following evening, he evinced his astonishment at having seen me in a dream on the preceding night. " Second Experiment at a Distance of Three Miles. Madame W., in her sleep, was to hear a conversa- tion between me and two other persons, relating to APPARITIONS mt a certain secret; and when I visited her on the third day, she told me all that had been said, and showed her astonishment at this remarkable dream. '' Third Experiment at a Distance of One Mile, An aged person in G. was to see in a dream the fu- neral procession of mj deceased friend S., and when I visited her on the next day her first words were that she had in her sleep seen a funeral procession, and on inquiry I learned that I was the corpse. Here then was a slight error. " Fourth Experiment at a Distance of One-Eighth of a Mile. Herr Doctor B. desired a trial to convince him, whereupon I represented to him a nocturnal street-brawl. He saw it in a dream, to his great astonishment. " Fifth Experiment at a Distance of Nine Miles. The intention was that Lieutenant N. should see in a dream, at 11 o'clock p. m., a lady who had been five years dead, who was to incite him to a good action. Herr N., however, contrary to expectation, had not gone to sleep by 11 o'clock, but was con- versing with his friend S. on the French campaign. Suddenly the door of the chamber opens ; the lady, dressed in white, with black kerchief and bare head, walks in, salutes S. thrice with her hand in a friendly way, turns to N., nods to him, and then returns through the door. Both follow quickly, and call the sentinel at the entrance; but all had vanished, and nothing was to be found. Some months after- ward, Herr S. informed me by letter that the cham- ber door used to creak when opened, but did not do so when the lady opened it — whence it is to be 208 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH inferred that the opening of the door was only a dream-picture, like all the rest of the apparition." This last instance, if we can accept it as reported, affords a pretty suggestion of telepathic transmis- sion of images which might otherwise be taken for phantasms of the dead. That is, it is a case in which we do not suppose that the agent is what appears to be such. The next case, which is accepted by Mr. Gurney, is much like those which I have quoted and has corroboration by the Rev. Stainton Moses. " One evening early last year, I resolved to try to appear to Z, at some miles distance. I did not inform him beforehand of the intended experiment; but re- tired to rest shortly before midnight with thoughts intently fixed on Z, with whose room and surround- ings, however, I was quite acquainted. I soon fell asleep, and awoke next morning unconscious of any- thing having taken place. On seeing Z a few days afterward, I inquired, ' Did anything happen at your rooms on Saturday night? ' ' Yes,' he replied, ' a great deal happened. I had been sitting over the fire with M., smoking and chatting. About 12.30 he rose to leave, and I let him out myself. I re- turned to the fire to finish my pipe, when I saw you sitting in the chair just vacated by him. I looked intently at you, and then took up a newspaper to assure myself I was not dreaming, but on laying it down I saw you still there. While I gazed without speaking, you faded away. Though I imagined you must be fast asleep in bed at that hour, yet you appeared dressed in your ordinary garments, such as you usually wear every day.' ' Then my experiment - m II w f.m m APPARITIONS 209 seems to have succeeded,' said I. ' The next time I come, ask me what I want, as I had fixed my mind on certain questions I intended to ask you, but I was probably waiting for an invitation to speak.' " A few weeks later the experiment was repeated with equal success, I, as before, not informing Z when it was made. On this occasion he not only questioned me on the subject which was at that time under very warm discussion between us, but detained me by the exercise of his will some time after I had intimated a desire to leave. This fact, when it came to be communicated to me, seemed to account for the violent and somewhat peculiar headache which marked the morning following the experiment; at least I remarked at the time that there was no apparent cause for the headache; and, as on the former occa- sion, no recollection remained of the event, or seem- ing event, of the preceding night." There are three instances of experiment by the same agent with different percipients. They have the advantage of independent testimony at both ends of the line and so have unusual confirmation. " On a certain Sunday evening in November, 1881, having been reading of the great power which the human will is capable of exercising, I determined with the whole force of my being that I would be present in spirit in the front bedroom on the second floor of a house situated at 22 Hogarth Road, Ken- sington, in which room slept two ladies of my ac- quaintance, viz., Miss L. S. V. and Miss E. C. V., aged respectively twenty-five and eleven years. I was living at this time at 23 Kildare Gardens, a dis- ^10 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH tance of about three miles from Hogarth Road, and I had not mentioned in any way my intention of trying this experiment to either of the above ladies, for the simple reason that it was only on retiring to rest upon this Sunday night that I made up my mind to do so. The time at which I determined I would be there was 1 o'clock in the morning, and I also had a strong intention of making my presence perceptible. " On the following Thursday I went to see the ladies in question, and, in the course of conversation (without any allusion to the subject on my part), the elder one told me, that, on the previous Sunday night, she had been much terrified by perceiving me standing by her bedside, and that she screamed when the apparition advanced towards her, and awoke her little sister, who saw me also. " I asked her if she was awake at the time, and she replied most decidedly in the affirmative, and upon my inquiring the time of the occurrence, she replied, about 1 o'clock in the morning. " This lady, at my request, wrote down a state- ment of the event and signed it. " This was the first occasion upon which I tried an experiment of this kind, and its complete success startled me very much." The percipient, Miss L. S. Verity, tells her story of the experience in the following language : — " On a certain Sunday evening, about twelve months since, at our house in Hogarth Road, Ken- sington, I distinctly saw Mr. B. in my room, about 1 o'clock. I was perfectly awake and was much ter- TjjMa'Jc;y.t» ' .>,;,«»j num^ APPARITIONS m rified. I awoke my sister by screaming, and she saw the apparition herself. Three days after, when I saw Mr. B., I told him what had happened ; but it was some time before I could recover from the shock I had received, and the remembrance is too vivid to be ever erased from my memory." The sister mentioned in this account also writes her confirmation of the event, and states that she, too, saw the apparition. It will be noticed also that the case is a collective one, and very much diminishes the probability of chance coincidence. The next instance by the same agent is very inter- esting, as it not only has confirmation, but also has psychological features of some interest. " On Friday, December 1st, 1882 (recorded ten days afterward), at 9.30 p. m., I went into a room alone and sat by the fireside, and endeavored so strongly to fix my mind upon the interior of a house at Kew {viz., Clarence Road), in which resided Miss V. and her two sisters, that I seemed to be actually in the house. During this experiment I must have fallen into a mesmeric sleep, for although I was conscious I could not move my limbs. I did not seem to have lost the power of moving them, but I could not make the effort to do so, and my hands, which lay loosely on my knees, about six inches apart, felt involuntarily drawn together and seemed to meet, although I was conscious that they did not move. " At 10 p. M. I regained my normal state by an effort of will, and then took a pencil and wrote down on a sheet of note-paper the foregoing statements. " When I went to bed on this same night, I deter- 212 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH mined that I would be in the front bedroom of the above-mentioned house at 12 p. m., and remain there until I had made my spiritual presence perceptible to the inmates of that room. " On the next day, Saturday, I went to Kew to spend the evening, and met there a married sister of Miss V. (viz., Mrs. L.). This lady I had only met once before, and then it was at a ball two years previous to the above date. We were both in fancy dress at the time, and as we did not exchange more than half a dozen words, this lady would naturally have lost any vivid recollection of my appearance, even if she had remarked it. " In the course of conversation (although I did not think for a moment of asking her any questions on such a subject), she told me that on the previous night she had seen me distinctly upon two occasions. She had spent the night at Clarence Road, and had slept in the front bedroom. At about half -past 9 she had seen me in the passage, going from one bedroom to another, and at 12 p. m., when she was wide awake, she had seen me enter the bedroom and walk round to where she was sleeping, and take her hair (which is very long) into my hand. She also told me that the apparition took hold of her hand and gazed intently into it, whereupon she spoke, saying, ' You need not look at the lines, for I have never had any trouble.' She then awoke her sister. Miss v., who was sleeping with her, and told her about it. After hearing this account, I took the statement which I had written down on the previous evening, from my pocket, and showed it to some of APPARITIONS S13 the persons present, who were much astonished al- though incredulous." Mrs. L. was asked to write out an account of her experience, and she did so at the time. It represents an identical story with the one quoted, and her sis- ter. Miss L. S. Verity, who was sleeping with Mrs. L. at the time and who was awakened, as stated, corroborates the experience of Mrs. L. Another experiment of the same kind by Mr. B. was previously promised to Mr. Gumey, who had heard of those quoted. On March 22d, Mr. B. wrote to Mr. Gurney that he was going to make his presence visible that night at a certain address at 12 p. M., and to let Mr. Gumey know the results later. He was to produce an apparition of himself to Miss L. S. Verity. Miss Verity's account of what her experience that night was is as follows, not having been informed of what Mr. B. intended to do. " On Saturday night, March 22d, 1884, at about midnight, I had a distinct impression that Mr. S. H. B. was present in my room, and I distinctly saw him whilst I was widely awake. He came towards me and stroked my hair. I voluntarily gave him this information, when he called to see me on Wednes- day, April 2d, telling him the time and the circum- stances of the apparition, without any suggestion on his part. The appearance in my room was most vivid, and quite unmistakable." In his account of it Mr. B. says that Miss Verity's " nerves had been much shaken, and she had been obliged to send for a doctor in the morning." Mr. 214 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH B. made no note of having intended to " stroke " the lady's hair, but says that he distinctly remembers this intention. We have two more experimental cases from good authorities. One of them represents a deferral of the apparition, so that it does not coincide exactly with the time of its intentional appearance. The first incident comes into requisition very well at this point, because it was an experiment prompted by reading the very accounts which I have just narrated. The experiment and the account were made by the Rev. Clarence Godfrey, and corroborated by the per- cipient. '' I was so impressed by the account on p. 105 [Vol. I. Phantasms of the Living'] that I determined to put the matter to an experiment. "Returning at 10.45 (on November 15th, 1886), I determined to appear, if possible, to a friend, and accordingly I set myself to work with all the voli- tional and determinative energy which I possess, to stand at the foot of her bed. I need not say that I never dropped the slightest hint beforehand as to my intention, such as could mar the experiment, nor had I mentioned the subj ect to her. As the ' agent ' I may describe my own experiences. " Undoubtedly the imaginative faculty was brought extensively into play, as well as the voli- tional, for I endeavored to translate myself, spiritu- ally, into her room, and to attract her attention, as it were, while standing there. My effort was sus- tained for perhaps eight minutes, after which I felt tired and was soon asleep. ririiiiiMl^ APPARITIONS 215 " The next thing I was conscious of was meeting the lady next morning (i. e., in a dream, I suppose?) and asking her at once if she had seen me last night. The reply came, 'Yes.' 'Plow?' I inquired. Then in words strangely clear and low, like a well-audible whisper, came the answer, ' I was sitting beside you.' These words, so clear, awoke me instantly, and I felt I must have been dreaming; but on reflection I remembered what I had been ' willing ' before I fell asleep, and it struck me, ' This must be a re-flex action from the percipient.' My watch showed 3.40 A. M. The following is what I wrote immedi- ately in pencil, standing in my night-dress : ' As I reflected upon those clear words, they struck me as being quite intuitive. I mean subjective, and to have proceeded from within, as my own conviction, rather than a communication from any one else. And yet I can't remember her face at all, as one can after a vivid dream.' " But the words were uttered in a clear, quick tone, which was most remarkable, and awoke me at once. " My friend in the note with which she sent me the enclosed account of her own experience, says : ' Remember the man put all the lamps out soon after I came up-stairs, and that is only done about a quarter to four.' " On the next day, the 16th of November, Mr. God- frey received from the percipient, evidently written without query from him, a letter telling her expe- rience. I quote the account. " Yesterday — viz., the morning of November ^16 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 16th, 1886 — about half -past three o'clock, I woke up with a start and an idea that some one had come into the room. I heard a curious sound, but fancied it might be the birds in the ivy outside. Next I experienced a strange, restless longing to leave the room and go down-stairs. This feeling became so overpowering that at last I rose and lit a candle, and went down, thinking if I could get some soda- water it might have a quieting effect. On returning to my room I saw Mr. Godfrey standing under the large window on the staircase. He was dressed in his usual style, and with an expression on his face that I have noticed when he has been looking very earnestly at anything. He stood there, and I held up the candle and gazed at him for three or four seconds in utter amazement, and then, as I passed up the staircase, he disappeared. The impression left on my mind was so vivid that I fully intended waking a friend who occupied the same room as my- self, but remembering that I should only be laughed at as romantic and imaginative, refrained from doing so. " I was not frightened at the appearance of Mr. Godfrey, but felt much excited, and could not sleep afterwards." There is apparently a mistake by Mr. Podmore in his report of the case, since the contents of the letter by the percipient indicates that her letter was written on the 17th. The apparent difficulty is ex- plained by the fact that Mr. Godfrey's account on the 16th was an oral one. In every other respect the -•tmMpMrtiiMlMginnHMMMMMM^^ APPARITIONS ^17 account is consistent. The difficulty is in the man- ner of writing the record. All that is noticeably coincidental in this incident is the apparition. The other circumstances are not reflected in it. It is probable that the impression was produced just before Mr. Godfrey was dream- ing, but it is interesting to remark that the figure was not that which Mr. Godfrey tried to transmit. He was to stand at the foot of her bed, but he was seen, as indicated, " under the large window on the staircase.^^ This is possibly an evidence that the telepathic impression, if such it be, occurred about the time of the dream, which was some hours later than the conscious effort to impress himself. Some may think it a case of deferred percipience, but that judgment will depend upon evidence that the phan- tasm was identical with that intended. I doubt if it is a case of deferred percipience. Apparently no effect took place until about the time of the dream. But this is anticipating explanation, and I have no desire to suppose, at present, anything more definite than a coincidence and which would awaken the sus- picion that the phenomenon is not chance, but has some causal connection not usual. This terminates the experimental instances of ap- paritions representing the living. There is another type which has its interest in the fact that they coincide with the illness of the person whose appari- tion is seen by another. This type represents spon- taneous cases, and is placed after the experimental instances because they lie nearer in character to the apparitions of the dying. Their interest and signif- 218 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH icance will appear in the sequel. I shall give a few instances of them. There is a complicated instance which represents a transitional type from the spontaneous to the ex- perimental apparition of the dead. It is complicated with planchette writing and table tipping and for that reason has a deep interest. I give it as show- ing a remarkable number of coincidences to which we should attach little interest but for the associated apparition. It is also associated with expectancy and suggestion on the side of the percipient. " On November S7th, 1887, while staying near Melbourne, Australia, Miss B. made the acquaintance of a lady, Miss L. T., who had the capacity of plan- chette writing. A communication written through her, and signed by the name of a well-known author- ess, ' M. N.,' stated that ' before another year rolled away, some gift of spiritual power would come to ' Miss B. Miss B. afterward went to Otago, and on the evening of December 31st, 1887, was persuaded by the friends with whom she was staying to try experiments in table tilting. Miss B., remembering the prediction made through Miss T.'s planchette, wished to inquire further about it, and the tilts indicating that ' M. N.' was present, she asked when the gift would come to her and what form it would take. The tilts replied that ' M. N.' would be able to make herself visible to Miss B. the same night. This occurred at 10 p. m. Miss B. states that she was not at all impressed by the incident, and went to bed and to sleep without thinking about it. In the middle of the night, she awoke suddenly and com- APPARITIONS 219 pletelj, with a curious feeling of what she describes as ' inward shivering ; ' the room was quite dark, and she saw a tall white female figure slowly rising between the wall and her bed with its arms stretch- ing out towards her. She turned away from it and saw it again after turning back; it then seemed to disappear slowly into the floor. After a few min- utes, she looked at her watch and found it was 2.25 A. M. In the morning she told her host, who confirms her account. " Six weeks later, Miss B. heard from Miss L. T. that she had been planchette writing with a friend at Melbourne on the evening of December 31st, 1887. ' M. N.' had communicated, but at 12.30 had said that she ' must go to ' Miss B. This time at Mel- bourne corresponds to about 2.15 a. m. at Otago, the time when Miss B. saw the apparition. " Miss L. T. writes on July 7th, 1889, giving an account of her planchette writing on the evening in question, and confirming Miss B.'s statements." The next instance I shall abbreviate. It is quoted by Mr. Myers from Phantasms of the Living. A man was sitting in his ofiice and happened to look toward the window, and saw an apparition of his wife " in a reclining position, with her eyes closed and the face quite white and bloodless, as if she were dead." When he got home in the evening he found that his wife had at that very time had a fainting fit, caused by a hurt to her child. Another gentleman reports an experience almost identical with this one, involving an apparition of his wife coincid- ing with a swoon in which she fell at the time. 220 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH I shall abbreviate another well-supported case. The details showing the proof of it would occupy too much space. A wife had left her husband a few days before in perfect health. Five days later she had an apparition of him, and on the next day re- ceived a telegram saying that he was dangerously ill. He died five days later. The case is taken from the Census of Hallucinations, as are several others to follow. " I saw the figure of my cousin (a nurse in Dub- lin) coming up-stairs, dressed in grey. I was in Tasmania, and the time that I saw her was between 6 and 7 P. M. on April 21st, 1888." Inquiry showed that the narrator, Miss Hervey, had noted her experience in a diary and that she did not know that her cousin was ill. This cousin died on April 22d, 1888, at 4.30 p. m. The nurses in the hospital in which she died wore grey, a fact unknown also to Miss Hervey. In the next instance death does not follow the ap- parition of the agent. It is uncorroborated. " My younger brother was in Australia, and had not written to his family for some four or five months, from which my mother had concluded he must be dead. I was sitting with her and my sister in our dining-room one morning, about 11 o'clock, engaged with my sister in writing a German exercise. Being at a loss for the right declension, I looked up, re- peating the declension, when I saw my brother stand- ing on the lawn in front of the window apparently looking at us. I jumped up, saying to my mother, ' Don't be frightened, mother, but there is T. come LlN APPARITIONS 221 back all right.' (My mother had heart disease, and I feared the sudden shock. ) ' Where ? ' said my mother and sister, ' I don't see him.' ' He is there,' I answered, ' for I saw him ; he is gone to the front door,' and we all ran to the door. My father, who was in the library, heard the commotion, and opened the door to ask the cause. I had by this time opened the front door, and not seeing my brother, I thought he was hiding for fun among the shrubs, so I called out, ' Come, T., come in, do not play the fool or you will kill dear mother.' No one answered, and then my mother exclaimed, ' Oh, you did not see him really, he is dead, I know he is dead.' I was mystified, but it did not seem to me the right solu- tion of the mystery. I could not think he was dead, he looked so honestly alive. To tell the truth, I believed for some time that he was in the garden. However, he was not, nor was he dead. About a year afterwards he returned home, and when re- counting his troubles, he told us that he had been very ill, and that while he was delirious he had con- stantly requested his comrades to lay him under the great cedar-tree on his father's lawn, and turn- ing to my father he went on, ' Yes, father, and do you know I seemed to see the dear old place as I do now.' ' When was that ? ' said my father. He gave the date, and my mother, who had written it down, looked and said, ' Why, that was the very time when your sister declared she saw you on the lawn.' ' Yes,' said my father, ' and your mother at once killed you,' and there was a good laugh at my expense. 2S2 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " I have often thought over it, but have never been able to account for it. This brother was not a particular favorite. Had it been my sister, I could have supposed that, as she was rarely absent from my mind, I might have conjured up her form in my imagination. Then I would have bitten my tongue out rather than have startled my mother. But I never doubted for a moment that my brother was there. I was about twenty-five years of age, and had no theory as to ghosts or spirits in general. I was at that time far too much occupied with the cares and anxieties of the family to have time to dwell on such fancies, and was also too matter-of- fact to think much about such phenomena. I remem- ber at the time, that I saw my brother dressed as he usually was when he came home from London, not as he was when he left home, nor as he could be in Australia, nor as I had ever seen him when walk- ing in the garden. He had on a tall hat and a black cloth suit, neither of which he had taken with him." It is not necessary to suppose this instance any- thing more than a subjective hallucination in order to admit its coincidental character. I am not con- cerned with its explanation, whether by chance or otherwise, but with the circumstances which tend to make the fact coincidental and coincidental with ill- ness. There are two instances of striking interest in that they have a sort of corroboration in the testimony of two persons. I shall quote them at length. The first narrative is by a Mrs. Walsh, of the Priory, APPARITIONS 223 Lincoln, and the second by a Mr. T. J. Hoare, who tells an account of his various experiences. Mrs. Walsh says : " The gentleman who teaches music in my house tells me that if anything sad or terrible happens to any one he loves, he always has an intimation of it. I am very fond of him, and I know he looks on me as a very true old friend, and one of my sons, now in India, is the dearest friend he has. " I went out one morning about 9 o'clock, carry- ing books for the library, and being very busy, took the short way to town. On some flags in a very steep part of the road, some boys had made a slide. Both my feet flew away at the same moment that the back of my head resounded on the flags. A police- man picked me up, saw I was hurt, and rang at the Nurses' Home close by, to get me looked to. My head was cut, and while they were washing the blood away, I was worrying myself that I should be ill, and how I should manage my school till the end of the term. I told no one in my house but my daughter, and no one but the policeman had seen me fall. I asked my daughter to tell no one. I had a miserable nervous feeling, but I pretended to her it was nothing. The next morning after a sleep- less night, I could not get up. It was my habit to sit in the drawing-room while the music lessons were given, so my daughter went in to tell Mr. that I had had a bad night, and was not yet up. He said, ' I had a wretched night, too, and all through a most vivid dream.' 'What was it?' she asked. ' I dreamed I was walking by the Nurses' Home, and ^24 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH while my head was being bathed I was worrying myself how I should manage my lessons till the end of the term, and the worrying feeling would not go.' » The account of Mr. Hoare is as follows: " I shall be very pleased to relate the account of a dream, as described by Mrs. Walsh most accurately, which took place on a Tuesday evening early in November, 1882. The dream consisted of this: I supposed I was going down the Grey stone Stairs, when I had a fall at the first flight, was picked up, and helped by a policeman to the Nurses' Institute, about twenty yards from the imaginary fall, being there attended by a nurse. I was much perplexed as to how I should manage to finish my work during the term. This was followed the next morning by a severe headache in the region of the imaginary blow. " On seeing Miss Walsh the following morning, I was told by her that Mrs. Walsh was unwell, but not the cause. I replied I, too, felt unwell, and ac- counted for it through the dream. Mrs. Walsh related to me the same evening her own adventure, which in every detail exactly coincided with my dream as happening to myself. I in no way knew of Mrs. Walsh's mishap till the evening after, when told by herself. " In another instance, whilst staying in Devon- shire, I received an impression, or felt a conviction, that something had happened to Mrs. Walsh. I think I wanted to write, so confident was I of some- thing having taken place, but desisted because I had APPARITIONS 225 left Lincoln through an outbreak of smallpox in the house next my rooms, only the previous week, so was unwilling to respond. On my return here, I found out that both my day (i. e., the day of the impression) and the accident — a fall — were true. " In many other instances have I received similar experiences, and so confident have I been always of their accuracy that I have written to the persons and places, and always received confirmation of my impressions. I have had, I think, ten or twelve im- pressions. They are quite unlike fits of low spirits and indigestion, and I can easily distinguish them from such, as in every case I have been most con- scious of outside action." I shall add one more instance of this type, because it is so well substantiated, the original letters of both parties having been preserved. It is reported in the Census of Hallucinations. On Wednesday, August 22d, 1888, 9 p. m., Miss Clark writes to Miss Maughan: " Were you crying on Sunday night near 11 o'clock? because I distinctly heard some one cry- ing, and supposed it was H — in the next room, but she wasn't there at all. Then I thought it might be you." On Thursday continuing the same letter, which was not posted until this day, the 23d, Miss Clark writes : " Thank you very much for your letter just come. I am so sorry your face is sore; did it make you cry on Sunday night? " Miss Maughan's letter, which brought out this 226 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH postscript note, was dated Tuesday evening, August 21st, and received August 23d, and was as follows; " On Sunday we went to see Wroxam Broad. We had an immense amount of walking to do altogether, and I think I got a little cold in my face in the morning, and all night I suffered with it, and my face is swelled still." On receipt of Miss Clark's query which was on August 26th, Miss Maughan writes a postscript to a letter begun before the receipt of Miss Clark's. " I am putting poultices on my gums. I have never had such a huge swelling before, and it wonH go down. It is so horribly uncomfortable .... " Saturday afternoon. — Thanks for letter. Yes, I was crying on Sunday night — only on account of pain. It was awful, but I only cried quietly, as Edith was asleep." There is a large number of this type of coinci- dence, but such examples as I have referred to illus- trate the class sufficiently for the purpose here, which is to indicate a phenomenon bordering on the next type to be considered. I quoted two or three instances in which the person represented in the phantasm soon afterward died, and others were in no way related to approximate death, but both are coincident with illness or mishap, some abnormal condition of the person seen either in sleep or in the waking state, though, as in the instance next to the last, the identity of the person really or appar- ently acting as agent and the appearance is appar- ently an experience of the percipient. This charac- teristic is a most important one for comparison APPARITIONS S27 with alleged mediumistic communications with the dead. The next type, still belonging to apparitions of the living in the classification of psychic researchers generally, is that of apparitions supposed to coin- cide with the death of the person assumed to be the agent in the communication of the influence. What place they are to have in explanation will be examined again. The point to be made at present is that they are the next step in a graduated series of phenomena. For my first instances I shall merely remind the reader of those which I narrated in Science and a Future Life, and which I shall not repeat here. They have such respectable sources that the ordinary con- firmation is not so imperative. I refer to the ap- paritions, coincident with the death of a friend, and seen by Lord Brougham, John Addington Symonds, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Keulemans, and the pre- monitory case of Mr. G. J. Romanes. I also there mentioned the case which Dr. Weir Mitchell reports of his father's knowledge in the life of a patient. Dr. Minot J. Savage is also quoted for one within his knowledge. These suggest the necessity of listen- ing to coincidental narratives purporting to repre- sent apparitions coincident with the death of the person seen. 2. Apparitions of the Dying Apparitions coincident with illness lead up to the type that is coincident with death. I have quoted mostly those which coincide only with illness and not such as coincided with a fatal illness. But there are 228 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH many apparitions associated with sickness that ends in death, and perhaps they are more numerous than the type quoted. But I wished to lay proper stress upon the type, which is apparently not in any way connected with phenomena suggesting a spiritistic theory, which depends for its proof upon such phe- nomena as indicate a discamate existence, or the possibility of an independent existence for con- sciousness. No claim for spiritism, as that is usually understood, can be made for apparitions that are associated only with illness. But such phenomena can be used to establish a causal nexus against chance, whatever the ultimate explanation, and in any scien- tific view of the facts it is necessary to articulate the more puzzling phenomena with those which give explanation less perplexity. Assuming telepathy as experimentally established it would seem most nat- ural to apply that hypothesis to as many of the facts as the circumstances will permit. At the same time it is as well also to know that the limits of such phenomena are not determined by the mere fact of illness, but extend to the point of the final exit of consciousness, and here we find a most numerous class of apparitions. I shall not quote as extensively from this type, though I shall make clear some idea of their com- parative frequency. A few instances will suffice to illustrate their character. The first instance is one that occurred in the waking state, and is well sup- ported. " N. J. S. and F. L. were employed together in an office, were brought into intimate relations with APPARITIONS 229 one another, which lasted for about eight years, and held one another in very great regard and es- teem. On Monday, March 19th, 1883, F. L., in coming to the office, complained of having suffered from indigestion; he went to a chemist, who told him that his liver was a little out of order, and gave him some medicine. He did not seem much better on Thursday. On Saturday he was absent, and N. J. S. has since heard he was examined by a medi- cal man, who thought he wanted a day or two of rest, but expressed no opinion that anything was serious. " On Saturday evening, March 24th, N. J. S., who had a headache, was sitting at home. He said to his wife that he was what he had not been for months, rather too warm ; after making the remark he leaned back on the couch, and the next minute saw his friend, F. L., standing before him, dressed in his usual manner. N. J. S. noticed the details of his dress, that is, his hat with a black band, his overcoat unbuttoned, and a stick in his hand ; he looked with a fixed regard at N. J. S., and then passed away. N. J. S. quoted to himself from Job, ' And lo, a spirit passed before me, and the hair of my fliesh stood up.' At that moment an icy chill passed through him, and his hair bristled. He then turned to his wife and asked her the time; she said, ' Twelve minutes to 9.' He then said, ' The reason I asked you is that F. L. is dead. I have just seen him.' She tried to persuade him it was a fancy, but he most positively assured her that no argument was of avail to alter his opinion. 230 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " The next day, Sunday, about 3 p. m., A. L., brother of F. L., came to the house of N. J. S., who let him in. A. L. said, ' I suppose you know what I have come to tell you? ' N. J. S. replied, ' Yes, your brother is dead.' A. L. said, ' I thought you would know it.' N. J. S. replied, 'Why.^' A. L. said, ' Because you were in such sympathy with one another.' N. J. S. afterward ascertained that A. L. called on Saturday to see his brother, and on leaving noticed the clock on the stairs was twenty-five minutes to 9 p. m. F. L.'s sister, on go- ing to him at 9 p. m., found him dead from rupture of the aorta." The narrator of this experience is N. J. S. him- self, and it is corroborated by his wife and the brother of the deceased as a witness of the coinci- dence. An interesting case of waking apparition is that of a workman in a cemetery. He had often seen a certain lady at the tomb of her husband, and one evening saw her there and went up to find her and to speak to her, after noticing that she had disap- peared in an unaccountable manner. He could not find any traces of her, and told his wife that eve- ning that he had seen her, but learned the next day that she had died about the time he saw her appari- tion. The next instance has an independent witness. It is a dream. " On the morning of February 7th, 1855, at Mount Pleasant Square, Dublin, where I lived, I awakened from a troubled sleep and dream, exclaim- ing, ' John is dead.' My husband said, ' Go to APPARITIONS 23U sleep, you are dreaming.' I did sleep, and again awoke repeating the same words, and asking him to look at the watch and tell me what o'clock it was then; he did so, and said it was 2 o'clock. I was much impressed by this dream, and next day went to the city to inquire at the house of business ; Mr. John C. being at Dundrum for the previous month. He was not a relative, but a very intimate friend. When I got to the house I saw the place closed up, and the man who answered the door told me the reason. ' Oh ! ma'am, Mr. John C. is dead.' ' When did he die ? ' I said. ' At 2 this morning,' he said. I was so much shocked, he had to assist me to the waiting-room to give me some water. I had not heard of Mr. C.'s illness, and was speaking to him a fortnight previously, when he was complaining of a slight cold, and expected the change of Dun- drum would benefit him, so that he could return to town immediately. I never saw nor heard of him after, until I dreamt the foregoing." The husband confirms the experience, and inquiry seems to indicate that Mrs. Lincoln, the narrator, is not in the habit of talking in her sleep, but has had several dreams which she regarded as premoni- tory. Another instance involves certain interesting details and evidential incidents. " On the morning of September 25th, quite early, I awoke from a dream to find my sister holding me, and much alarmed. I had screamed out, struggled, crying out, ' Is he really dead.^^ ' When I fully awoke I felt a burning sensation in my head. I 232 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH could not speak for a moment or two ; I knew my sister was there, but I neither felt nor saw her. " In about a minute, during which she said my eyes were staring beyond her, I ceased struggling, cried out, ' Harry's dead, they have shot him,' and fainted. When I recovered, I found my sister had been sent away, and an aunt who had always looked after me was sitting by my bed. In order to soothe my excitement she allowed me to tell her my dream, trying all the time to persuade me to regard it as a natural consequence of my anxiety. When in the narration I said he was riding with another officer, and mounted soldiers behind them, she exclaimed, ' My dear, that shows you it was only a dream, for you know dear Harry is in an infantry, not a cav- alry, regiment.' Nothing, however, shook my feel- ings that I had seen a reality ; and she was so much struck by my persistence, that she privately made notes of the date, and of the incidents, even to the minutest details of my dream, and then for a few days the matter dropped, but I felt the truth was coming nearer and nearer to all. In a short time the news came in the papers — shot down on the morning of the 25th when on his way to Lucknow. A few days later came one of his missing letters, telling how his own regiment had mutinied, and that he had been transferred to a command in the 12th Irregular Cavalry, bound to join Havelock's force in the relief of Lucknow." There is a discrepancy between the date mentioned by the narrator and that given in the East India Register, which places the death on September 26th. APPARITIONS 233 This might equally be a mistake, as the aunt is cer- tain she never destroyed her notes, though not being able to put her hands on them, and refuses to look them up because she thinks attention to such things is ridiculous. The coincidence, then, is in the de- tails of the experience more distinctly and possibly also in the dates. In another case a gentleman was at the theatre in Toronto, Canada, and saw an apparition of his brother in the pit. He exclaimed : " Good God ! there is my brother," pointing to the figure. But his friend with him did not see anything. The man, in his excitement, rushed down-stairs to find the brother, but did not succeed. On his return to Eng- land shortly afterwards he learned that his brother had died at the French Hospital, in Shanghai, in China, and inquiry showed that the death coincided very closely with the apparition. Another instance involved a sleepless night until something like a vision of a strange country oc- curred when the subject became conscious that he was with his brother in India, and that this brother died while he was with him. Three months later the news came which confirmed the death of this brother coincidentally with the vision. I take a little group of dream coincidences related to death and all of them experienced by the same person. "On the night of 29th of January, 1873, I dreamt that I saw a baby in a bath. When the post- bag came in the morning, I said to my husband, ' Please don't open it yet, I am sure there will be 234 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH news of a death in it, but I can't tell whose; none of our friends are ill, and the dream was so vague.' He laughed, and proceeded to open the bag; it con- tained a letter from the Rev. S. A., announcing the death of his only boy. [Here the dreamer had no knowledge of the illness of the person who died.] " On the night of April 24th, 1877, I dreamt that I saw an infant in a bath. On the 25th, I heard that my cousin, B. C, had died on the 24th. [Here the dreamer had no knowledge of the illness of the person who died.] " On June 11th, 1877, while asleep in a chair, I dreamt that I saw my husband's aunt, Mrs. B., look- ing at an infant in a bath ; she was dressed in white, with a strong Hght about her. She died in the evening of that day. [Here the dreamer knew of the illness of the person who died.] " Before my husband's death on November 17th, 1880, I had my warning dream. I seemed to stand in deep mourning watching an infant in a bath." [Here the dream preceded the death by more than a day. The husband had been long ill, but his immediate death was not expected.] Before giving her experiences the lady, who is narrating them, states that her coincidental dreams are associated, as the reader will see, by the vision of an infant in a bath, and I have called attention to this group to note the circumstance that the vision or dream does not always have its significance in the details, but in the death coincidence. In study- ing the nature and conditions of such " communica- APPARITIONS 235 tions " or apparitions such phenomena are of very great importance. Professor Royce records a number in the Ameri- can Proceedings, two of which I abbreviate. In the first a lady had sailed to Glasgow on the Cambria, expecting to return on the same steamer, but chose another, with some regret that she could not have / come back with the captain who had been so kind to her. On the night of October 19th, the same year, she called out in her sleep " The ship has gone down." A friend sleeping in the same room awakened her and asked what was the matter. The lady was crying and said : " The ship in which I went to Eng- land is lost. I saw it go down with all on board." She felt that Captain Carnigan was lost. Inquiry showed that the steamer Cambria was wrecked off Donegal, and only one person saved to confirm the fact, the news not reaching New York until after the dream occurred. The next instance is given on the authority of Mr. Ira Sayles, then on the United States Geological Survey, and addressed to Dr. Morton Prince, of Boston. Mr. Sayles vouches that the dream was told him before its verification later. A young man to whom the mother was much at- tached went west in the troublous times of slavery. One night not far from midnight the mother awoke her husband with a scream. He exclaimed : " Mother, what is the matter?" She replied: "Why! don't you see Johnny there.? He says to me, ' Mother, they've shot me. The bullet entered right here,' and he pointed to a hole over his right eye." The 236 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH husband tried to convince his wife that she was dreaming, but she always insisted that she both saw and heard her son Johnny. " Two weeks afterward, however, the young man that went with the young Stewart to Kansas re- turned. The first thing he did was to visit Mr. Stewart at his law office, and to narrate to him there, that on a certain day, at four o'clock p. m., a Mis- sourian shot Johnny, the hall entering his head just above his right eye. Moreover, the day of the shoot- ing proved to be the very day on which Mrs. Stewart had her vision, at night, about six hours after the shooting." Mr. Sayles adds an interesting coincidence to this story. " I had myself," he says, " in 1856, lost a little daughter, nine years of age, and after her (Mrs. Stewart's) son's death she told me that Johnny came to her window one night, tapped on it, and she asked, ' Who's there ? ' The reply was : ' Johnny, I have found Florett.' That was my daughter's name." Most probably this last experience was a coinci- dental dream, though it is told as if it were a normal event. It is probably a waking dream of the border- land type. I shall refer briefly to one collective case, as in- volving three percipients, a lady, her nurse, and a little child. A Mrs. Hunter looked into her bedroom and saw a large cofl5n on the bed, " and sitting at the foot of it was a tall old woman steadfastly regarding it." She was laughed at for her experience, and when she went to the nursery, the nurse complained APPARITIONS 237 that she " felt so queer," having " at 7 o'clock seen a tall old woman coming down-stairs." This, too, was laughed off, and about half an hour afterwards she " heard a piercing scream from her little daughter, aged five, followed by loud, frightened tones, and she then heard the nurse soothing the child. Next morning little E. was full of her wrongs. She said that a ' naughty old woman was sitting at the table and staring at her, and that made her scream.' Nurse told me that she found the child awake, sit- ting up in bed, pointing to the table, and crying out, ' Go away, go away, naughty old woman ! ' There was no one there. Nurse had been in bed some time, and the door was locked." A day or two afterwards a letter came from a son of a Mrs. Macfarlane, announcing her death, and telling that " her last hours were disturbed by anx- iety for my husband and his family." Mrs. Hunter had left in Mrs. Macfarlane's care a box of valu- ables. I can quote no more of this type. But to give some idea of their frequency I may mention the following particulars. In the record of the Phan- tasms of the Living there are some 380 instances, and these are but a small proportion of the number now collected. Of these thirty-one are of the wak- ing type, sixty-seven are coincidental dreams in- volving death coincidences, ninety-nine are border- land cases, meaning that the coincidental experience occurs in the borderland between sleeping and wak- ing states, forty-nine are visual apparitions alone, thirteen are visual and auditory, and eight are au- 238 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ditory and tactile, while thirty-seven are collective, involving two or more percipients. Such a showing indicates that the death coincidences are more numer- ous than others ; for I have quoted a very large proportion of the type not involving death coinci- dences. But here we have about 380 instances ap- parently related to the death of persons indicated by the experiences narrated, and the question is whether we can treat them as casual, that is, acci- dental hallucinations. The answer of the collectors to this query is seen in their calculations which I can only abbreviate. I cannot explain the process by which the calculation was made, but it was extremely conservative. The conclusion was that the number of " subjective hallu- cinations of a recognized voice should be sixty-three times as large as they have been shown to be " in order to consider the hypothesis of chance. Another method of calculation showed that " from these data the odds against the occurrence by accident of as many coincidences of the type in question (auditory) are more than a trillion to ort^.^* The same authors further state : " But the reduc- tio ad ahsurdum becomes far more striking when we apply the doctrine of chances to visual cases." The calculation here shows that " the odds against the occurrence, by accident, of as many coincidences of the type in question as the thirty-one which that circle produced, are about a thousand billion trillion trillion trillions to oneJ*^ If this is the case with so small a collection, how would it stand with a larger one? APPARITIONS 239 3. Apparitions of the Dead A hard and fast line between apparitions of the dying and of the dead cannot be drawn, especially as the collection supposed to represent the former included all cases supposed to have occurred within twelve hours after death. The exact time of final demise cannot be determined, and besides it was as- sumed that any telepathic impression produced by a dying person on a distant friend might have its emergence into consciousness deferred for the amount of time assumed. Hence the Hmit was an arbitrary line. However this may be, the Phantasms of the Living did not include those presumably of the dead. A primary reason for this was the desire to examine cases which did not present superficial credentials in favor of a spiritistic interpretation. In this ac- count, however, I do not require to limit myself to those types, especially as it is apparent to most per- sons that the same general theory will be involved in the explanation of phantasms of the dead. The reasons for this will appear in the conclusion of this chapter. Apparitions of the dead were as much the sub- ject of inquiry by the Society as the types already illustrated, but the results were not published in the volumes from which I have so freely quoted. They were published and discussed in the Society's Proceedings. I shall have to quote from these sources, being careful to have the interval between death and the apparition great enough to assure interest in the phenomenon. Before quoting in- 240 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH stances, however, it is important to remark their importance and the difficulties attending their in- vestigation. In phantasms of the Hving and of the dying there is apparently evidence that, not being due to chance, they are objectively caused, though this cause may be nothing more than telepathy. But, says the late Mr. Edmund Gurney, " It is evident that in alleged cases of apparitions of the dead, the point which we have held to distinguish certain apparitions of living persons from purely subjective hallucinations is necessarily lacking. That point is coincidence between the apparition and some critical or excep- tional condition of the person who seems to appear; but with regard to the dead, we have no independent knowledge of their condition, and therefore never have the opportunity of observing any such coinci- dences. " There remain three, and I think only three, con- ditions which might establish a presumption that an apparition or other immediate manifestation of a dead person is something more than a mere subjective hallucination of the percipient's senses. Either (1) more persons than one might be independently af- fected by the phenomenon; or (2) the phantasm might convey information, afterwards discovered to be true, of something which the percipient had never known; or (3) the appearance might be that of a person whom the percipient himself had never seen, and of whose aspect he was ignorant, and yet his description of it might be sufficiently definite for identification. But though one or more of these APPARITIONS 241 conditions would have to be fuUj satisfied before we could be convinced that any particular apparition of the dead had some cause external to the percipient's mind, there is one more general characteristic of the class which is sufficiently suggestive of such a cause to be worth considering. I mean the dispro- portionate number of cases which occur shortly after the death of the person represented. Such a time- relation, if frequently enough encountered, might enable us to argue for the objective origin of the phenomenon in a manner analogous to that which leads us to conclude that many phantasms of the liv- ing have an objective (a telepathic) origin. For, according to the doctrines of probabilities, a hallu- cination representing a known person would not hy chance present a definite time-relation to a special cognate event — viz., the death of that person — in more than a certain percentage of the whole num- ber of similar hallucinations that occur; and if that percentage is decidedly exceeded, there is reason to surmise that some other cause than chance — in other words, some objective origin for the phantasm — is present." The application of this principle will ap- pear in the sequel. The first instances shall represent apparitions near the point of death, but perhaps probably after it. I take them from Mr. Gurney's record of them, and readers of his work will know that he was abundantly cautious. I shall choose the cases with reference to their trustworthiness as narratives and regardless of their explanation. I have at present no theory to prove by them, but only that coincidental experiences 342 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH took place. The first instance was contributed by the Bishop of Carhsle as an experience in the life of the Rev. G. M. Tandy. I shall abbreviate it. " When at Loweswater, I one day called upon a friend, who said, ' You do not see many newspapers ; take one of those lying there.' I accordingly took up a newspaper, bound with a wrapper, put it into my pocket and walked home. " In the evening I was writing, and, wanting to refer to a book, went into another room where my books were. I placed the candle on a ledge of the bookcase, took down a book and found the passage I wanted, when, happening to look towards the win- dow, which was opposite to the bookcase, I saw through the window the face of an old friend, whom I had known well at Cambridge, but had not seen for ten years or more. Canon Robinson (of the Char- ity and School Commission). I was so sure I saw him that I went out to look for him, but could find no trace of him. " I went back into the house and thought I would take a look at my newspaper. I tore off the wrap- per, unfolded the paper, and the first piece of news that I saw was the death of Canon Robinson ! " The next instance has a romantic and pathetic interest, and the coincidence is well supported. " I send you a short account, describing what I experienced at the time of the apparition of my friend, who was a young gentleman much attached to myself, and who would willingly (had I loved him well enough) have made me his wife. I became engaged to be married, and did not see my friend APPARITIONS 243 (Mr. Akhurst) for some months, until within a week of my marriage (June, 1878), when in the presence of my husband he wished me every happi- ness, and regretted he had not been able to win me. " Time passed on. I had been married about two years and had never seen Mr. Akhurst, when one day my husband told me he (Mr. Akhurst) was in Newcastle and was coming to supper and was going to stay the night. When my husband and he were talking, he said my husband had been the more for- tunate of the two, but he added if anything hap- pened to my husband he could leave his money to whom he liked and his widow to him, and he would be quite content. I mention this to show he was still interested in me. " Three months passed and baby was born. When she was about a week old, very early one morning I was feeding her, when I felt a cold waft of air through the room and a feeling as if some one touched my shoulder; my hair seemed to bristle all over my head and I shuddered. Raising my eyes to the door (which faced me), I saw Mr. Akhurst standing in his shirt and trousers, looking at me, when he seemed to pass through the door. In the morning I mentioned it to my husband. I did not hear of Mr. Akhurst's death for some weeks after, when I found it corresponded with that of the appa- rition, and though my father knew of it before, he thought in my weak state of health it were better I should not be told." The husband confirms the story and states that 244 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH it was six months afterward before he learned that Mr. Akhurst was dead, and inquiry showed that he had died at about 1 a. m. July 12th, and the date of the apparition was in September following, this being fixed by the birth of the child in that month. The next instance is also a good one evidentially, as the distance involved and the independent attes- tation of a newspaper show that the death could not have been known in the ordinary way. " On the 2d November, 1876, I arrived at my brother's house. My journey had been a long one — from 8 A. M to 8 p. M. I sat up late talking to my sister-in-law, and about 12 o'clock went to my room. There I spent some time arranging my be- longings. I found I had left something I wanted down in the hall, and feeling restless, I suppose, thought I must get it then, and not wait until the morning. So down-stairs I went. The house is a large one ; the passages long. My room was in the third story, and I had to go to the entrance-hall. It took me some time. On returning and entering the corridor in which my room was, I saw, standing beyond my doorway, a figure. It looked misty, as if, had there been a light behind it, I should have seen through the mist. This misty figure was the likeness of a friend of ours whom I knew to have been on a voyage to Australia. I stood and looked at ' It.' I put my hand over my eyes and looked again. Still it was there. Then it seemed to pass away, how I cannot say. I went on and into my room. I said to myself. My brain is tired out; and I hurried to bed so as to get rest. APPARITIONS 245 " Next day I told my sister-in-law what I had seen. We laughed about my ghost. " I was away from home three weeks. On my return, my mother showed me the account in a news- paper of our poor friend's body having been cast on shore at Orfordness and buried as an unknown castaway the very time I saw the figure. We were the only friends he had in England, but why I saw him I cannot tell. It did no good to any one. One thing I should tell you, I had not been thinking or speaking of him." The headstone on the man's grave reads : " In memory of Frederick Gluyas Le Maistre, 2d Officer of the barque Gauntlet^ of London, native of Jersey, Channel Islands, aged 24 years and 5 months, whose body was found near Orfordness Harbour, October the 22d, 1876, his death having been occasioned by falling from on board the above-named vessel in the Downs on the 27th of September of the same year." The next instance I shall have to abbreviate, though it comes from excellent authority and is so interesting that only the want of space can excuse the abbreviation. The man who narrates it as his experience laughed at the idea that apparitions really occurred and had been in places where such things ought to occur if they were true. But he had a friend, whom he calls J. P., that had gone out to the Transvaal in Africa. When they bade each other farewell they expected to see each other again. But one night the narrator had gone to bed about one o'clock. Early in the morning this experience took place. ^46 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " Standing by my bed, between me and the chest of drawers, I saw a figure, which, in spite of the unwonted dress — unwonted, at least, to me — and of a full black beard, I at once recognized as that of my old brother officer. He had on the usual khaki coat, worn by the officers on active service in eastern climates. A brown leather strap, which might have been the strap of his field service glass, crossed his breast. A brown leather girdle, with sword attached on the left side, and revolver-case on the right, passed round his waist. On his head he wore the ordinary white pith helmet of service. I noticed all these particulars in the moment that I started from sleep, and sat up in bed looking at him. His face was pale, but his bright black eyes shone as keenly as when, a year and a half before, they had looked upon me as he stood with one foot on the hansom, bidding me adieu. " Fully impressed for the brief moment that we were stationed together at C — in Ireland or some- where, and thinking I was in my barrack-room, I said, ' Hello! P., am I late for parade? ' P. looked at me steadily, and replied, ' I'm shot.' " ' Shot ! ' I exclaimed. ' Good God ! how and where .f^ ' " ' Through the lungs,' replied P., and as he spoke his right hand moved slowly up the breast, until the fingers rested over the right lung. " ' What were you doing. f^ ' I asked. " ' The General sent me forward,' he answered, and the right hand left the breast to move slowly to the front, pointing over my head to the window, APPARITIONS 24T and at the same moment the figure melted away. I rubbed my eyes, to make sure I was not dreaming, and sprang out of bed. It was then 4.10 a. m. by the clock on my mantelpiece." That day the gentleman looked for news from the war, but found none, and spoke to a friend about his experience, and on the next day the news placed his friend J. P. among the killed in the battle of Lang's Neck. The London Gazette shows that the man was killed probably between 11 and 12 o'clock on January 28th. It seems probable that the narra- tor's time, 4.10 in the morning, is wrong for his experience, but Mr. Gumey thinks that the appari- tion took place after death or very close to it. The next instance is especially interesting for the manner in which the coincidence was determined, and more especially for the way in which the person's identity was established and the coincidence made credible as pertinent to the possibility of an objective cause of some kind. I shall have to quote it in full. " I was sleeping in a hotel in Madeira in January, 1885. It was a bright moonlight night. The win- dows were open and the blinds up. I felt some one was in my room. On opening my eyes, I saw a young fellow about twenty-five, dressed in flannels, standing at the side of my bed and pointing with the first finger of his right hand to the place where I was lying. I lay for some seconds to convince myself of some one being really there. I then sat up and looked at him. I saw his fea.tures so plainly that I recognized them in a photograph which was shown me some days after. I asked him what he wanted; 248 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH he did not speak, but his eyes and hand seemed to tell me I was in his place. As he did not answer I struck out at him with my fist as I sat up, but did not reach him, and as I was going to spring out of bed he slowly vanished through the door, which was shut, keeping his eyes upon me all the time. " Upon inquiry I found that the young fellow who appeared to me died in the room I was occupy- ing." The writer signs himself as John E. Husbands, and a Miss Faulkner, who was resident at the hotel, writes her knowledge of the incident. " The figure that Mr. Husbands saw while in Madeira was that of a young fellow who died un- expectedly months previously, in the room which Mr. Husbands was occupying. Curiously enough, Mr. H. had never heard of him or his death. He told me the story the morning after he had seen the figure, and I recognized the young fellow from the description. It impressed me very much, but I did not mention it to him or anv one. I loitered about until I heard Mr. Husbands tell the same tale to my brother; we left Mr. H. and said simultane- ously, ' He has seen Mr. D.' " No more was said on the subj ect for days : then I abruptly showed the photograph. " Mr. Husbands said at once, ' This is the young fellow who appeared to me the other night, but he was dressed differently .' — describing a dress he often wore — 'cricket suit (or tennis) fastened at the neck with a sailor knot.' I must say that Mr. (MMaMNHMMHOMttlM APPARITIONS 249 Husbands is a most practical man, and the very last one would expect a ' spirit ' to visit." Another case, described as a " local apparition," because it seems to represent a tendency of the al- leged spirit to linger about the locality in which the demise took place, involved the appearance to an entire stranger of a " ghost " which, when described, was recognized as an exact representation of the person who had died in that bed, even to the position and appearance. The account is too long to quote. When asked to describe her apparition the lady who had the experience said the " old wife was on top of the bed with her boots on, and her legs drawn up as though she were cold; her face was turned to the wall, and she had on what is known in the Highlands as a * sow-backed mutch,' that is, a white cap which only women wear ; it has a frill round the front, and sticks out at the back. She also wore a drab colored petticoat and a checked shawl round her shoulders drawn tight." This description is complete enough for identity, and when a neighbor heard the description, she at once recognized the old woman meant, who had been beaten by her husband and died from the effects of it, precisely in the posi- tion and condition indicated, and wholly unknown to the parties in the house who had rented it for the summer some time after the death of the woman. I am not troubled by the peculiarly uncanny features of the story, as science has nothing to do with these, but with the coincidence, whatever the explanation. The next instance also is well sustained, and be- cause of the distance involved and the difficulties of ^^ggA 250 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH supposing any possible previous knowledge it may be quoted. " I saw two respectably dressed females driving alone in a vehicle like a mineral cart. Their horse stopped at a water to drink ; but as there was no footing, he lost his balance, and in trying to recover it he plunged right in. With the shock, the women stood up and shouted for help, and their hats rose off their heads, and as all were going down I turned away crying, and saying, ' Was there no one at all to help them? ' upon which I awoke, and my hus- band asked me what was the matter. I related the above dream to him, and he asked me if I knew them. The impression of the dream and the trouble it brought was over me all day. I remarked to my son it was the anniversary of his birthday and my own, also — the 10th of First Month (January), and this is why I remember the date. "The following Third Month (March) I got a letter and a new^spaper from my brother in Australia, named Allen, letting me know the sad trouble which had befallen him in the loss, by drowning, of one of his daughters and her companion. Thou will see by the description given of it in the paper how the event corresponded with my dream. My niece was bom in Australia, and I never saw her." This was on the night of January 9th that the dream occurred and it was mentioned, as said, to the son on the 10th. The paper from Australia, sent to Kensington, London, was issued on Friday, Janu- ary 11th, and states the facts as follows. " A dreadful accident occurred in the neighbor- APPARITIONS 251 hood of Wedderburn, on Wednesday last, resulting in the death of two women, named Lehey and Allen. It appears that the deceased were driving into Wedderburn in a spring cart from the direction of Kinypanial, when they attempted to water their horse at a dam on the boundary of Torpichen Sta- tion. The dam was ten or twelve feet deep in one spot, and into this deep hole they must have inad- vertently driven, for Mr. W. McKechnie, manager of Torpichen Station, upon going to the dam some hours afterward, discovered the spring cart and horse under the water, and two women's hats floating on the surface. The dam was searched, and the bodies of the two women, clasped in each other's arms, re- covered." According to the deposition of a brother of one of the drowned women, he saw them about 11 a. m., and did not see them alive after that, while it was about 4 p. M. that Mr. McKechnie found the cart, etc. The husband of the dreamer confirms his wife's statements as to the date and details of the dream. Mr. Goirney recognizes that the dream occurred some hours after the death, but knows no way to explain the coincidence unless " clairvoyance " or telepathy from the mind of the brother when he wrote his letter. But a " clairvoyance " that does not coincide with the events seen is one not familiar even to the imagination of the spiritualists. Telep- athy from a living person might have been the description of the phenomenon. The next instance I shall abbreviate. It is taken from Mr. Gurney's collection, A gentleman and his 852 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH wife were staying at a strange house. A lady stay- ing at the same place died in her chair one evening and the fact was mentioned the next morning to his wife by the gentleman indicated. That night the wife had a vision of a man " at the foot of the bed, an old gentleman with a round rosy face, smiling, his hat in his hand, dressed in an old-fashioned coat (blue) with brass buttons, hght waistcoat, and trou- sers." The lady said nothing about it until she could inquire of one of her nieces whether the appa- rition could be that of Dr. R. On describing her experience to the niece the latter at once recognized the correctness of the guess. This Dr. R. died in 1865, and the apparition of him occurred in 1868. Mr. Gurney has twenty-seven instances of this type in his collection. Unfortunately he died before he could make it larger, and the later results of in- quiry were embodied in the Census of Hallucinations, from which an instance or two must be quoted. " My friend, whom I had known intimately for the greater part of my life, had become weak and failing from age, and, for a week or so, I had been receiving very serious accounts of her condition. On the Saturday morning (January 31st), following days of illness, I received letters saying she was better, and fears of her immediate death seemed past. " On the Sunday evening, however, I had a strong impression that my friend had gone from us ; but through cross-country posts I got no news on Mon- day morning. On the Monday night when I lay down in bed there came to me a conviction that she was trying to make her presence felt, and I became APPARITIONS 253 aware of her standing in an angle between my bed and the fire; not oppressed with extreme age as I had often seen her in the last year or so, but in the vigor of middle age when I had most intercourse with her. " The color of her dress and cap — the fashion of both — were absolutely familiar to me as belonging to that time. She stood poised in a natural attitude — her figure with absolute solidity — looking straight at m}^ face lying on the pillow. . . . " In the morning following the appearance I re- ceived the news of her death, which had taken place between 3 and 4 a. m. on the Sunday morning (Feb- ruary 1st)." I shall also abbreviate the next case and make it the last taken from the volume quoted. " At Fiesole, on March 11th, 1869, I was giving my little children their dinner at half -past one o'clock. It was a fine hot day. As I was in the act of serving macaroni and milk from a high tureen, so that I had to stand to reach it and give my attention to what I was doing, — on raising my head (as much from fatigue as for any purpose), the wall opposite me seemed to open, and I saw my mother lying dead on her bed in her httle house at . Some flowers were at her side and on her breast ; she looked calm, but unmistakably dead, and the coffin was there. " It was so real that I could scarcely believe that the wall was really brick and mortar, and not a trans- parent window — in fact, it was a wall dividing the hotel in which we were living from the Carabinieri. I was in very weak health — suffering intensely a 254^ ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH with neuralgia — the baby was almost still-bom, on January 31st. " Owing to a family quarrel, I had left England without telling my people where I was going; but I was so fond of my mother that, when in Paris, I made an excuse to write to an old servant, who lived with my mother, to ask her for a toy which we had left with her — the ob j ect being to get news of my mother. Reply came that for years she had not been so well and strong; thus I had no reason for imagining her to be dead. " I was so distressed at the vision, that I wrote to her (my mother) to give her my address, and entreat her to let me know how she was. By return of post came the statement that she had died on March 5th and was buried on the 11th. " When I was married, my mother made me prom- ise, as I was leaving home, to be sure to let her know in any way God permitted if I died, and she would try to find some way of communicating to me the fact of her death — supposing that circumstances prevented the usual methods of writing or telegraph- ing. I considered the vision a fulfilment of this promise, for my mind was engrossed with my own grief and pain — the loss of baby, and my neuralgia, and the anxieties of starting a new life." The facts show that this apparition occurred six days after the death. The sisters of the narrator before the mother's death saw an apparition of their godmother, who had died in 1852. There are twelve of these cases reported in the Census, and added to Mr. Gurney's collection make thirty-nine. I quote APPARITIONS 255 one more involving a promise to return after death. " I awoke from sleep and saw a brother, who had been dead more than five years, standing at the foot of my bed. He stood still, gazing at me earnestly. I cannot remember a voice, but he distinctly con- veyed to my mind the impression that I was to have no more anxiety and that all would be for the best. I said, ' Oh, Arthur! ' and jumped up to go to him, when he vanished. This took place on a bright sunny morning about 4.30 a. m. in June, 1872. No one was present. I was in perfect health ; but we had family trouble at the time. I was twenty-eight. My brother in life had said he would appear after death if possible." I turn next to cases of apparitions more than a year after the death of the person apparent. They are interesting as removing the ordinary interpre- tation of their meaning. The effects of anxiety or grief cannot be assumed as the most likely cause. A gentleman was looking after some books in a library and saw a face apparently peering around the comer of a shelf and then noticed that the body was in the bookcase. He advanced toward the figure and noticed that it was " an old man with high shoulders, with his back toward the observer and a shuffling gait. The face was pallid and hairless, and the orbits of the eyes were very deep." On mentioning the experience to a friend the next morning this person at once recognized the man represented and said, " Why, that's old Q ! " In- quiry showed that he had died about the time of ^56 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH year at which the gentleman saw the figure. Mr. Myers says that the experience was obtained by him- self from a person known to himself and widely known in the scientific world. Mr. Myers reports fourteen cases of this type, and they may be added to the thirty-nine already mentioned, making fifty- three in all. Mr. Myers also quotes twenty-five cases of appar- ently continued knowledge of terrene events after death involving coincidences similar to those of apparitions of the living. They are long and tedious cases, and I shall not quote them. The number, however, can possibly be added to the fifty-three cases, and will make seventy-eight in all. In dealing with the explanation of such phenomena the first problem was to ascertain whether such coin- cidences could be by chance. It was assumed that the circumstances might justify supposing that the experiences were casual hallucinations. For various reasons the total number of cases are cut down to thirty, which were well enough accredited to accept them as definitely coincidental without a doubt. This was estimated to be about one in forty-three of the thirteen hundred cases, coincidental and non-coin- cidental. " Since the average death-rate in England and Wales (from which the cases were collected) is 19.15 per 1,000, the probability that any one person taken at random will die on a given day is 19.15 in 365,000 or about 1 in 19,000. This may be taken as the general probability that he will die on the day in which his apparition is seen and recognized, APPARITIONS 257 supposing that there is no causal connection between the apparition and death. In other words, out of every 19,000 apparitions of living persons there should be by chance one death coincidence. " But the actual proportion found, viz., 1 in 43, is equal to about 440 in 19,000, or 440 times the probable number. Or, looking at the matter another way, we should require 30 x 19,000, or 570,000 ap- paritions to produce by chance thirty cases of death coincidences. Of these apparitions we may safely assume that about one-quarter, or 142,000, would be remembered. We should therefore expect to have to collect 142,000 cases, instead of 350, in order to obtain by chance thirty death coincidences." The 380 were cut down to 350. Assuming that chance is excluded from the ex- planation of the coincidences in the thirty cases, we can well imagine how much more it is excluded from the larger number, if made acceptable. The ex- planation of the phenomena after thus eliminating chance is not so easy. Of course, the general ex- planation of leading psychical researchers, at least for all apparitions preceding death and so including apparitions of living and dying persons, is telepathy. The circumstance which lends this hypothesis its importance is that the first two classes of them can lay no claims to being proof of survival after death, at least according to the very nature of the case and the standard of evidence, — which must be that of the personal identity of a deceased person, that is, apparitions not due to chance. The telepathic hypothesis is most apparent in all instances repre- 258 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH senting apparitions of living persons, whether they be of the experimental or spontaneous type. The fact that a number of these apparitions or coinci- dental phenomena had no relation to illness or death, but were definitely related to the present ideas or states of consciousness in the agent and percipient, and not apparitions of the dying or dead, is a fact that coincides exactly with the type of phenomena quoted in support of experimental telepathy. The consequence is that, if we are to assume a cause at all as against chance coincidence, we have to assume telepathy. It is certain that, evidentially, no other causal agency, if telepathy be this, can be supposed until we have gone farther in psychic research. Of course this assumed telepathy means that the causal nexus is directly between two living minds and repre- sents the access to present active mental states of the agent transferred to the percipient. I do not use the term to express any other type of phenomenon. There is a way of looking at apparitions of the living that turns them into an argument for the possibility of the discarnate, and it is one that has recommended itself to philosophic thinkers, though I do not agree with their view of the matter. If the soul can divest itself of its bodily connection long enough to appear to a friend or stranger at a dis- tance it has no such relation to the organism as is implied by the materialistic interpretation of con- sciousness as a function of it. It can assume a sort of " discarnate " condition before the body perishes. We might even suppose, consistently with the numer- ous apparitions of that kind, that the conditions for APPARITIONS ^59 its appearance might be better before death than after. But disregarding this as requiring more evi- dence than we can command, the supposition that the tenure of the body is as precarious as apparitions of the hving might imply, we might defend an in- dependence of the organism that is wholly incom- patible with materialism, and that once supposed survival after death would at least be a proved possibility, and only two objections could be raised to it. One would be the view of the Epicurean who maintained that the soul, though an independent organism, also perished at the same time as the body. The other would be the real or alleged absence of evidence for its being a fact, though this would not affect the possibility per se. The real objection to using apparitions as an ar- gument for the independent existence of mind is the hypothesis of telepathy. We find reason to believe, accepting telepathy as a fact, that the thoughts of the agent may appear as apparent physical realities, that is, the thoughts of the agent are the percipient's hallucinations. Such a conception does not require us to suppose that the soul leaves the body, but only that it can produce an hallucinatory effect at a dis- tance while it remains in connection with the organ- ism, or even is nothing more than a function of that organism. Hence the possibility of telepathic phan- tasms must stand in the way evidentially of inter- preting phantasms of the living as evidence of the independent existence of mind, especially when we have to deal with apparitions of the living which coincide with the existence of normal consciousness y 260 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH of the person at a place distant from the place of appearance. It is this that lends force to the ex- planation hj telepathy. I will concede difficulties, however, in the telepathic theory, and that we may admit some claims in apparitions of the living to the possibility that the mind has its own existence occasionally made independent of the organism. Those who do not admit the telepathic hypothesis as a phenomenon at all can hardly have any other explanation of phantasms of the living than their testimony to this independent existence of mind; and in any case the point of view is suggestive enough to entitle scepticism to play its part in re- ducing the confidence of the materialist. Instead of finding the unity of all apparitions, of the living and the dead, in telepathy between the living it would seem as rational to assume that both can be explained by the independence of mind, and that the evidence for this independence in the case of the dead is harder to obtain in the same quantity as in the case of the living. At any rate with the inde- pendence of mind assumed we have only an eviden- tial question to deal with in its survival after death, though that evidence might not be necessary to such a conclusion when we assumed the indestructi- bility of energy. When it comes to apparitions of the dead, if they can be supposed to be more than chance coincidence will explain, it will not be so easy to apply the tele- pathic theory without admitting survival after death, which is the thing to be proved. The object of forming our theories on phenomena not involving APPARITIONS 261 survival is to both articulate the facts with our nor- mal knowledge so far as that is possible and to eliminate all the prejudices attaching, whether justly or unjustly, to the belief in transcendental realities. But the very grounds on which telepathy is applied to apparitions of the living are such as to exclude its application to apparitions of the dead without assuming their existence, unless we suppose that the telepathic hallucination is produced from the mind of some living relative of the deceased. It is clear, however, in any case, that the same general theory has to be adopted for all three classes of apparitions, those of the living, those of the dying, and those of the dead. The whole series graduate into each other in such a manner, are so decidedly alike in their essential characteristics, and are so related to critical moments in the lives of certain persons that it is very difficult to avoid the same ultimate explanation, whether that includes survival or not. If this hy- pothesis be telepathy, as usually defined, it limits the process, evidentially, to the living, and as long as this is supposed and is actually connected with the approach or climax of death there is a natural tendency to extend it to cases beyond, even if we have to assume that the agent is not the same in apparitions after death as the agent before death. The spiritualist, of course, is so anxious to main- tain the truth of his hypothesis, whether it applies to coincidences among the living or not, that he is chary of admitting telepathy in the cases involving apparitions after death, and presses his case as strongly as the telepathlst can press his for appa- 262 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ritions of the living and dying. Evidentially, as I have said, I think that telepathy is the only assump- tion beyond chance that is applicable to the first two classes, whatever else may be implied. I shall not lay any special emphasis on the limi- tations of the conception of telepathy. It is a fact that its scientific meaning and legitimacy hmits its import to coincidences between the thoughts of living persons having a causal rather than a casual con- nection, and also not due to normal methods of ac- quiring knowledge. There is no adequate scientific evidence for any other kind of " telepathy," and the public entirely misunderstands the position of the scientists when it assumes that telepathy is coexten- sive with any coincidence in supernormal knowledge. But I shall not urge this limited import of the term as implying that any other explanation of the coin- cidences is impossible or improbable. The one point to be accepted and pressed is, that whatever its import in relation to the facts described, it is always taken to imply a direct process between living minds and excluding the necessity of an indirect process through transcendental agencies. In the absence of evidence that there are such realities there is no al- ternative to making it a process between the living. But even on this supposition there are two things in this assumed process about which we are ignorant. (1) We know nothing about the nature of this as- sumed process, whether it represents a mode of motion between two living minds or some peculiar activity not recognized in our conceptions of matter and motion. (2) We cannot exclude the agency of APPARITIONS ^63 transcendental realities from mediating the whole result, though we may have no satisfactory evidence that they exist. They might produce all sorts of effects, if they existed, and yet not reveal their iden- tity. We are completely in the dark as to both their existence and influence, and as long as that is the case we cannot say they do not produce the results, though we have no right to assume that they do. I present the nature and limitations of our knowl- edge on this matter simply to show that we have hardly yet begun to investigate the problem, and to indicate that there is, as yet, no excuse for the unintelligent application of the hypothesis to every supernormal fact that comes along. But assuming that the process is a direct one be- tween two minds and not involving a third mind to mediate it, there is a most important fact to be taken into account in any application of the hypothesis. If the reader will notice the various cases quoted he will find that nearly always the agent involved in the supposed telepathy is the person seen or thought of. Rarely, if ever, does some one else than the agent appear in the apparition. It is so constant that any other occurrence must be regarded as the anomaly, and the telepathy must be assumed to be normally between the percipient and the person seen or heard, or both seen and heard. Accepting this as the prevalent fact, we can at once see that ap- paritions of the dead cannot be explained on this assumption without admitting that such apparitions are a proof of the existence of discarnate spirits. On the other hand, if we assume that apparitions of 264 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the dead are telepathically produced by the Hving, say friends of the deceased, we introduce another conception of the agent in apparitions of the hving than the person seen, and we are where we should only require evidence of discarnate existence, say in mediumistic phenomena, in order to make plausi- ble the intervening agency of the discarnate to pro- duce supernormal phenomena of all kinds. At any rate we cannot assume the person represented in the apparition to be the agent without involving our- selves in the spiritistic theory for apparitions of the dead not due to casual hallucinations. It would cer- tainly be strange and anomalous to suppose the ex- perimenter, the ill person, or the dying person, the agent in producing telepathic apparitions and not suppose that the same probability applied to the hypothesis of spirits in phantasms of the dead. I think this will be clear to every one, and equally clear, perhaps, the fact that any assumption of other agents than those who appear in the living is want- ing in evidence, and would open the way to a tertiwm quid, or third agency concealed behind the scenes. There would be no limit to assumptions of tran- scendental influences on this idea of the cause. But it is possible that we have more to deal with in the application of telepathy than the mere process and agents involved. As long as we are seeking conclusive evidence for a discarnate existence we must naturally see that any classification of phe- nomena as telepathic must exclude the spiritistic ex- planation. The theory of discarnate spirits requires for its support phenomena proving personal identity APPARITIONS 265 after death; telepathic phenomena, or all such as are explicable by telepathy, cannot be evidence of an- other hfe. That is self-evident. But if we are to believe that apparitions of the dead not due to chance are evidence of spirit existence, we may well imagine that the method of communication between spirits and the living is telepathic, as we have observed that telepathic impressions appear in the form of phan- tasms or hallucinations. We could thus extend telep- athy to cover all the phenomena of apparitions, not as their sole condition, but as the process of effecting the result, while we seek for reasons to explain that the phenomena are common to the living and the dead. The point, then, to be considered in telepathy, besides the process, is its meaning. Concentration on its evidential relation to the spiritistic hypothesis dis- tracts attention from its relation to the materialistic hypothesis in general. We must examine this matter. There is no reason to doubt the fact of survival after death except the meaning and strength of the materialistic theory of organic life. Materialism holds that consciousness is a function of the organism, analogous to digestion and circulation, and so per- ishable with the body. The only way to finally dis- lodge this position is to produce evidence that a par- ticular consciousness has not perished as a fact, and the evidence that will suggest this very strongly would be apparitions of the dead not due to chance and mediumistic communications which cannot be explained by telepathy between the Kving. Now this materialism can hold its ground as long as we have no evidence that consciousness is not a function of 266 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH organism. Hence the whole problem seems limited to the proof of this one fact, and it does not require THAT WE HAVE ANY THEORY OF THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. The common notion is that there is a soul inhabiting the body and that this soul is conscious. Assuming such a realitj — and I do not mean to question the fact — we can imagine it to have all sorts of capacities not indicated in its normal func- tioning. We might thus have a position to make intelligible the occurrence of supernormal phenomena. But we have the existence of the soul to prove, and its proof requires that we obtain traces of an indi- vidual consciousness, which we can refer to a soul, if we prefer, or make a stream in the universal force, it matters not. But supposing a continuance of con- sciousness after death, the most natural supposition is that it proves a soul, that is, some sort of reality, finite or infinite, it matters not, which exists before death and of which consciousness is a function. The argument for survival does not require us to assume more than a stream of consciousness to satisfy the spiritistic and to disprove the materialistic theory. Hence the problem appears to be one in which the only question is whether a relation between one liv- ing consciousness and another is enough to account for the phenomena, or whether we have to suppose a discarnate consciousness to account for some of them. In thus looking at the problem we forget to ask WHAT THE MEANING OF TELEPATHY IS IN RELA- TION TO MATERIALISTIC THEORY. Now the materialistic theory assumes that func- tions of the organism are limited in their action to APPARITIONS 267 the spatial mass of the body. Digestion, circulation, assimilation, sensation, all the functions go on in the body and produce no known transcendental ef- fects on matter. Radiation of heat occurs, but this is not properly a function of the body, but is the result of a function in the body which is limited. We are isolated beings. We get into relation with others only by contact of some kind. Ordinary communi- cation of ideas is only an interpretation of signs and this interpretation is an intra-organic process and does not go beyond the organism. In our normal life consciousness is assumed to be such a function, on the materialistic hypothesis ; and if it be such it cannot extend its operations beyond the organism, any more than digestion and circulation can do it. I do not say that it does not so extend its influence as a fact, but only that on the ordinary conception of materialism it cannot so extend its agency, with- out widening materialistic conceptions so much as to deprive it of antagonism to the opposite theory. Telepathy certainly involves an extraordinary influ- ence at a distance. This might imply such a varia- tion from the usual explanations as to require some " soul " or reality other than the body to account for the exceptional facts, and if that is once granted we have the doctrine of the indestructible nature of substance, whether sensible or supersensible, as a guarantee that the soul survives dissolution, whether personal identity does or not. Consequently, telep- athy may have a meaning for functions that inter- fere as effectively with the materialistic hypothesis as identity phenomena. If so it is doubly a mis- 268 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH take to suppose it in any way opposed to a larger interpretation of mental facts. It can only limit the kind and amount of conclusive evidence for sur- vival while it opens a presumptive way to difficulties with materialism right within the field of supernor- mal phenomena that are not evidence of this survival. It opens this way by suggesting the very conditions of survival before any final proof of it is possible. Another difficulty with the materialistic theory is that, in the case of apparitions of the living near death or in illness, it has to assume that consciousness can do more than in the normal condition. Ordinary materialism must assume that consciousness performs its functions best when the organism is healthy, and it would not naturally expect telepathic phenomena to be caused by the conditions which weaken the mind's action. There is no use to say that it is the subliminal and hyperaesthesic conditions of the or- ganism that determined it and not the normal func- tions of the body ; for hyperaesthesia and subliminal action involve activities when the normal conscious- ness seems entirely suspended, and the existence of powers on the borderline of more refined and delicate agencies than the grosser senses is a suspicion of a supersensible world that robs materialism of its con- ceptions as based upon ordinary sensations. The more that we refer telepathic action to subliminal action the more likely we make the theory that sub- liminal functions do not represent the natural physi- cal world of sense, but are a foresight of a spiritual world toward which the evolution of the mind is moving. All that would remain would be to produce APPARITIONS 269 phenomena that make telepathy between the Hving improbable in order to have scientific evidence for this survival. Besides, this view would consist with the possibility that apparitions of the dead are not telepathic ally produced by the living, if they are not assumed to be due to chance. The consequence is that we have the wider theory of a soul " sub- stance " to account for consciousness in any condi- tion, incarnate or discarnate, while we may imagine the process of communication between the incarnate and discarnate to be what we please, as a condition of explaining the facts. Besides, the supposed existence of a subject other than the brain for consciousness in the living and capable of surviving would furnish an assumption which would make probable the oc- currence of all sorts of borderland phenomena be- tween the living and the dead, such as clairvoyance, telepathy, etc., to say nothing of hyperaesthesia and allied phenomena. The trouble which many people have with the sup- position that, if phantasms of the dead rightly attest the existence of spirits, they offer an insoluble diffi- culty in the appearance of clothes. This is the ob- jection which has occurred to nearly every one who has been asked to respect the testimony for such facts. All that I have to say is that the circumstance is wholly irrelevant. If the coincidence is such that it attests survival as the only natural explanation, we must treat the apparition of clothes as an inci- dental phenomenon to be explained by subsidiary hypotheses. The fact is not an objection to the hypothesis, but a perplexity in it. However, this is no ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH not the answer to the objection so constantly urged. The real reply is that the phenomenon does not give the intelligent psychologist any trouble. He is quite willing to recognize that the whole apparition, clothes and all, is an hallucination. He simply re- gards it as a veridical hallucination, and thereby means that it is caused by an extra-organic though supernormal stimulus, as subjective hallucinations are produced by intra-organic or normal extra- organic stimuli. He does not require to believe that the spirit is seen where it is any more than he sup- poses that telepathic phantasms are real as seen. Readers, if they consult the original data or evi- dence for telepathy, will notice that the telepathic effect is an hallucination, and very often one that is fused more or less with some memory of the subject. This is quite frequently the case with apparitions of the dead. Readers may have noticed that they often represent the individual as known by the percipient and not as the subject died. True, their present and unknown appearance is often presented, but per- haps not so often as in the form of some memory picture of them. Hence, as we do not suppose any- thing more than a stimulus to affect the subliminal with identity of the agent, we can assume that the subliminal, according to its usual function, produces a phantasm of the person. When the subject is seen as he has not been known we can assume that the process is clairvoyant, and not telepathic. In some cases both processes may be active, and we have a fusion of memory pictures elicited by telepathy and of real facts elicited by clairvoyant conditions. APPARITIONS £71 Kant's theory of the ideahty of space will help this conception out, so that the orthodox idealist can have no criticism to make upon the view. I am, of course, indulging hypotheses at this point, but, with perhaps the exception of clairvoyance, they are hypotheses accepted by psychical researchers at least, and they are telepathy and telepathic hallu- cinations. These remove the ordinary difficulty of the laymen about apparitions and make possible the belief that all sorts of representations in the physical and mental world may take place, as effects of the discamate, without being facsimiles of the source which instigates them. I, of course, hold such theo- ries in abeyance for further evidence, and would not push them, but to solve the perplexities which seem natural and to remove such difficulties as the attempt to explain all three types of apparitions by telep- athy between the living must involve us without further investigation. Nor would I encourage con- fidence in the spiritistic explanation of phantasms of the dead, until we have gathered much more mate- rial and' perhaps material with better evidence of its supernormal character. Apparitions are not likely to be sufficient proof of survival after death for the scientific man until better records are made of the facts. The hypothesis can be tolerated as an alter- native to ordinary suppositions not evidentially sus- tained, but it is not to be considered as in any respect proved by the data now on hand. We shall have to educate those who have such experiences to observe more carefully and to make contemporary records of them. CHAPTER VIII CLAIRVOYANCE The older common meaning of clairvoyance made it very comprehensive. It comprised all that scientific analysis had reduced to several classes, namely, telepathy, apparitions, and mediumistic phenomena, as well as what is now known technically as " clair- voyance " by the chief leaders of psychic research. This technical meaning is the result of distinguish- ing carefully between phenomena that do not ap- parently involve the same causes, and certainly do not assume the same form. Clairvoyance technically, therefore, is a name for a supposed or alleged process of perceiving objects or scenes at a distance and with- out any of the normal impressions of sense. It dif- fers from telepathy in the fact that the phenomena presumably explained by it are not necessarily mental states of some one at a distance. The apparent char- acter of clairvoyance is that it represents percep- tion of distant objects rather than the perception of distant minds. That is, at least, the superficial appearance of the phenomena, and they seem neither to serve as evidence of discarnate agency nor of telepathy. It is, therefore, narrowed down to a process apparently analogous to vision, with the difference that it is supernormal, whereas ordinary vision is normal. In thus defining it, however, I am 272 CLAIRVOYANCE 273 not implying that it is a fact, but that, if it be a fact, this is the conception which we have to take of it. Whether the alleged phenomenon is possible or not I shall not assume at present. I shall only re- count first the alleged facts presumed to suggest or support the claim. One thing we must remember. The definition of clairvoyance may be very clear to our imagination, but we must not forget that it ought to be defined, and in the end must be defined, by the facts which we discover. We do not yet know what the facts are that might illustrate it and much less do we know the limits of the alleged phenomenon. Besides, for most people there is complete ignorance of the delicate psychological functions which might give rise to phenomena that are taken for supernormal, and which are truly not normal, but which are by no means what the imagination too often takes them to be, simply for the lack of psychological knowl- edge that would modify their interpretation. Con- sequently I do not mean by the definition given that we have any clear-cut idea of the cause of alleged clairvoyant experiences: for these may shade into all sorts of extraordinary phenomena that are not what the definition implies. I mean only to use a term which distinguishes certain alleged facts from others with which we are either more familiar or more satisfied. It may be a mistake to select the extreme type of phenomenon to define what is meant by the term. Nevertheless this is the only clear way to distinguish the alleged phenomenon from others, and we may then estimate the evidence for its claims ^n ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH according as it illustrates the claim or is explicable by simpler hypotheses, though they are not the famihar ones to our normal experience. In presenting the facts claiming classification as clairvoyant I shall have no reference to their ulti- mate explanation. It may be that they will articulate either with telepathy or hyperaesthesia at various times, but it will appear difficult in others to suppose any such complication. However this may be, I shall start with historical cases told by Mr. Frank Podmore in his Modem Spiritualism, The first instance is the historical case of Alexis Didier, whose performances had mystified even Robert Houdin, the prince of prestidigitators and illusion workers. Didier was in charge of a man who had the reputation of a gentleman. Didier apparently read cards with their faces toward the table, or passages in a closed book and the like. But in the absence of any careful records and conditions that would exclude very simple fraud with which most intelligent men are perfectly familiar, there is no reason, as Mr. Podmore clearly shows, to suppose that anything of a really remarkable character oc- curred. The whole case is an example of what had imposed upon generations of credulous or careless people. Mr. Podmore is right in attaching more weight to the account of Professor de Morgan, who had been a careful observer of unusual phenomena. He was an able mathematician and logician in the University of London. Though Professor de Mor- gan's account is long, it is too important to abbre- viate, especially as certain details are necessary to CLAIRVOYANCE ^75 protect the case against certain very simple objec- tions to its cogency in favor of something super- normal. The following is Professor de Morgan's ac- count of an experiment by Mrs. de Morgan, and ex- plains itself: " I have seen a good deal of Mesmerism, and have tried it myself on for the removal of ailments. But this is not the point. I had frequently heard of the thing they call clairvoyance, and had been assured of the occurrence of it in my own house, but always considered it as a thing of which I had no evidence direct or personal, and which I could not admit till such evidence came. " One evening I dined at a house about a mile from my own — a house in which my wife had never been at that time. I left it at half -past ten, and was in my own house at a quarter to eleven. At my entrance my wife said to me, * We ha^e been after you,* and told me that a little girl whom she mes- merized for epileptic fits (and who left her cured), and of whose clairvoyance she had told me other in- stances, had been desired in the mesmeric state to follow me to Street, to — 's house. The thing took place at a few minutes after ten. On hear- ing the name of the street, the girl's mother said: " ' She will never find her way there. She has never been so far away from Camden Town.' " The girl in a moment got there. ' Knock at the door,' said my wife. ' I cannot,' said the girl ; ' we must go in at the gate.' (The house, a most unusual thing in London, stands in a garden; this my wife knew nothing of.) Having made the girl go in 276 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH and knock at the door, or simulate, or whatever the people do, the girl said she heard voices up-stairs, and being told to go up, exclaimed, ' What a comi- cal house! there are three doors,' describing them thus. [Diagram given.] (This was true, and is not usual in any but large houses.) On being told to go into the room from whence voices came, she said, ' Now I see Mr. de Morgan, but he has a nice coat on, and not the long coat he wears here; and he is talking to an old gentleman, and there are ladies.' This was a true description of the party, except that the other gentleman was not old. ' And now,' she said, ' there is a lady come to them, and is beginning to talk to Mr. de Morgan and the old gentleman, and Mr. de Morgan is pointing at you and the old gentleman is looking at me.' About the time indicated I happened to be talking to my host about Mesmerism, and having mentioned what my wife was doing, or said she was doing with the little girl, he said, ' Oh, my wife must hear this,' and called her, and she came up and joined us in the manner described. The girl then proceeded to describe the room : stated that there were two pianos in it. There was one [piano], and an ornamental sideboard, not much unlike a pianoforte to the daugh- ter of a poor charwoman. That there were two kinds of curtains, white and red, and curiously looped up (all true to the letter), and that there were wine and water and biscuits on the table. Now my wife, knowing that we had dined at half-past six, and thinking it impossible that anything but coffee could be on the table, said, ' You must mean coffee.' The CLAIRVOYANCE 277 girl persisted, ' Wine, water, and biscuits.' My wife, still persuaded that it must be coffee, tried in every way to lead her witness, and make her say coffee. But still the girl persisted, ' Wine, water, and biscuits,' which was literally true, if not being what people talk of under the name of a glass of wine and a biscuit, which means sandwiches, cake, etc., but strictly wine, water, and biscuits. " Now all this taking place at twenty minutes after ten was told to me at a quarter to eleven. When I heard that I was to have such an account given I only said, ' Tell me all of it, and I will not say one word ; ' and I assure you that during the narration I took the most especial care not to utter one syllable. For instance, when the wine and water and biscuits came up, my wife, perfectly satisfied that it must have been coffee, told me how the girl persisted, and enlarged upon it as a failure, giv- ing parallel instances of cases in which the clairvoy- ants had been right in all things but one. All this I heard without any interruption. Now that the things happened to me as I have described at twenty minutes after ten, and were described to me as above at a quarter to eleven, I could make oath. The cur- tains I ascertained next day, for I had not noticed them. When my wife came to see the room she in- stantly recognized a door, which she had forgotten in her narrative. " All this is no secret. You may tell whom you like, and give my name. What do you make of it? Will the never-failing doctrine of coincidence ex- plain it? " 278 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Mr. Podmore quotes also a letter of Professor Gregory, of Edinburgh. Professor Gregory had paid a visit to a friend in a town some thirty miles from Edinburgh, and there met a lady who had been twice mesmerized by this friend and who was not known to Professor Gregory. She apparently had some clairvoyant powers and described Professor Gregory's house in Edinburgh so accurately that he was moved to the experiment which he describes in the following letter: " I now asked her to go to Greenock, forty or fifty miles from where we were (Edinburgh was nearly thirty miles distant), and to visit my son, who resides there with a friend. She soon found him, and described him accurately, being much interested in the boy, whom she had never seen nor heard of. She saw him, she said, playing in a field outside of a small garden in which stood the cottage, at some distance from the town, on a rising ground. He was playing with a dog. I knew there was a dog, but had no idea of what kind, so I asked her. She said it was large, but young Newfoundland, black, with one or two white spots. It was very fond of the boy and played with him. * Oh,' she cried, suddenly, ' it has jumped up and knocked off his cap.' She saw in the garden a gentleman reading a book and looking on. He was not old, but had white hair, while his eye- brows and whiskers were black. She took him for a clergyman, but said he was not of the Established Church, nor Episcopalian, but a Presbyterian dis- senter. (He is, in fact, a clergyman of the highly respectable Cameronian body, who, as is well known, CLAIRVOYANCE ^7& are Presbyterians, and adhere to the covenant.) Be- ing asked to enter the cottage, she did so, and described the sitting-room. In the kitchen she saw a young maid servant preparing dinner, for which meal a leg of mutton was roasting at the fire, but not quite ready. She also saw another elderly fe- male. On looking again for the boy, she saw him playing with the dog in front of the door, while the gentleman stood in the porch and looked on. Then she saw the boy run upstairs to the kitchen, which she observed with surprise was on the upper floor of the cottage (which it is), and receive something to eat from the servant, she thought a potato. " I immediately wrote all these details down and sent them to the gentleman, whose answer assured me that all, down to the minutest, were exact, save that the boy did not get a potato, but a small biscuit from the cook. The dog was what she described; it did knock off the boy's cap at the time and in the place mentioned; he was himself in the garden with a book looking on; there was a leg of mutton roasting and not quite ready; there was an elderly female in the kitchen at that time, although not of the household. Every one of which facts was en- tirely unknown to me, and could not, therefore, have been perceived by thought-reading, although, had they been so, as I have already stated, this would not have been less wonderful, but only a different phenomenon." Mr. Podmore narrates a well-supported case in which a clairvoyant was sought to find the sum of 650 pounds of money sent to the bank by post and that 280 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH had disappeared. The clairvoyant, the envelope being put into her hand, said that the two bank-notes and a bill of exchange were handed in at the counter and that they would be found in an envelope with other papers, in an inner room at the bank. They were found amongst some old circulars on the mantelpiece in the manager's private room. The term " private room " might suggest a room outside the bank and so defeat the importance of the phenomenon, but evidently Mr. Podmore means the manager's private room in the bank, and even then the coincidence is not accurate enough to treat it so seriously as a case of possible clairvoyance, though Mr. Podmore does not exactly do this. He recognizes its defects. Professor Barrett, of Dublin, reports an experi- ment by a friend which has a point of interest, espe- cially as many of the phenomena reported as clair- voyance in the early history of psychic research, turned out to be most probably mind-reading. It was found on investigation in many instances that the operator in the mesmeric experiment had to know the facts before they could be told by the subject. But the present instance quoted by Mr. Barrett shows this was not necessary in this particular case. " A lady sub j ect has often told us the time by a gold hunting watch, which was put in a box after the hands were altered to any extent by the keyless arrangement, so that no one knew their position. I remember one instance with her. There were some friends in the room looking on. The hands of the watch were twisted round promiscuously ; it was then put in a box and the closed box put in her hand. CLAIRVOYANCE ^81 She at once said what o'clock it was. My father opened the watch to see if she was right, but found to his astonishment that she was wrong. He told her so, and gave her the watch to try again. She at once said she was right. He told her to look again, but she got crusty and refused to look for some time. He pressed her to look once more. She still said she was right, but that it was now a minute past the time she first said. My father opened the watch to show those present the mistake she made, but found that she was perfectly right, that he had made a mistake himself. In that instance the thoughts of the mesmerizer were against her." Professor Charles Richet, of the Physiological Institute in Paris, later in the history of the Society's work performed two series of experiments in clair- voyance with the same subject that Drs. Gibert and Pierre Janet had in their experiments in telepathic hypnotism. The first series consisted of sixty-eight trials at telling cards enclosed in an envelope which would not permit the transmission of light through it. His scientific reputation will give us confidence in his judgment as to the conditions under which fraud was excluded, and so will the results. Hence I shall not detail the manner of conducting the ex- periments. In the sixty-eight experiments he found the successes far beyond what chance could explain. The second series he thought not beyond this view, and they did not involve as careful precautions as the first series. I shall not quote results at length. It suffices to state that a man of his character was not above experimenting under very adverse circum- 282 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH stances and that he thought there was reason to beheve that chance did not account for the coinci- dences in one series. As for myself I think that experiments with cards are useful only for mathemat- ical measurements of chances, while other types of coincidence will more easily overcome the objection from chance and guessing. Drs. Dufay and Azam, French physicians, the former in Blois and afterward a Senator of France, give some instances. The papers from which the article in the Proceedings of the Society for Psy- chical Research was translated were read before The Society for Physiological Psychology (Societe de Psychologic Physiologique) and published in their publications. Dr. Dufay reports the following ex- periment in which his friend, Dr. Girault, took part. " In order that there should be no suspicion of a prearranged scene between him and his servant. Dr. Girault had promised to get me to arrange the programme of the seance — the wrapping up, for instance, of certain packets so as to disguise the nature of their contents, which contents Dr. Girault himself was not to know. These little packets were to be given to the somnambulist, who was to find out what was inside them. Thus the matter was settled and the day fixed. " I had already put aside for the purpose a few objects, not of common use, in order that chance should not too greatly assist our clairvoyante, when I received a letter from Algiers, from the com- mander of an infantry battalion, whom I had known in the garrison at Blois. He related to me several CLAIRVOYANCE 283 episodes of his life in the desert, and especially spoke of his health, which had been very much tried. He had been sleeping under canvas during the rains, and this had resulted in violent dysentery, both in his case and in that of the majority of his comrades. " I placed this letter in an envelope without ad- dress or postmark, and carefully stuck down the edges ; then I put the whole thing into a second envelope of a dark color, and closed it in like manner. " On the day appointed I arrived a little late at Madame D.'s. Marie was already asleep, and was thus unaware of my presence, merely knowing that I was to be there. The ten or twelve people assem- bled in the room were simply stupefied by what they had just seen; the somnambulist having correctly discerned the contents of several packets, which they had prepared in the way I had prepared mine. But I left my own in my pocket, so as to avoid monotony in the experiments, only slipping my letter into the hand of a lady present, and intimating by a sign that it was to be passed on to Dr. Girault. He received it without knowing that it came from me, and placed it between Marie's hands. " I did not notice whether her eyes were open or shut, but, as will be readily understood, that is a matter of no importance in such a case. " ' What have you got in your hand.'^ ' asked Dr. Girault. " ' A letter.' " ' To whom is it addressed ^ ' " ' To Dr. Duf ay.' ' By whom.'* ' « HMH 284 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " ' A military gentleman whom I do not know.' " ' And what does this military gentleman speak of in this letter? ' " ' He is ill. He speaks of illness.' " The somnambulist was then sent on a tour of travelling clairvoyance to visit and report on this military gentleman, and did so, but nothing is said about the success. As to the coincidences in what I have quoted the reader can decide for himself, and the authority from which the facts come and the apparent cautions taken to make the experiment an evidential one speak also for themselves. With the explanation, telepathic or clairvoyant, I am not yet concerned. But it must be noticed that Dr. Girault did not know the contents of the letter and the som- nambulist was supposed to be in rapport with him. Whether the phenomena were due to chance or telep- athy from Dr. Dufay's mind may be conjectured by those interested in that interpretation. Another experiment with the same subject by Dr. Dufay has some better incidents in it, one especially, as the narrative shows. Owing to one circumstance which the sceptic has a right to know, namely, the proximity of the subject to the suicide that occurred in the same prison, the story must be given entire. " It is in the prison of Blois that we next encoun- ter Marie, under circumstances which I have already made known. Owing to judicial formalities, she was not set at liberty the same day that her innocence had been proved. " The following day I was sent for very early, on account of a suicide which had just taken place. A CLAIRVOYANCE 285 prisoner, accused of assassination, had strangled him- self with his neck-handkerchief, one end of which he had fastened to the foot of his bed, which was fixed to the floor. Laid prone on the flags of the cell, he had had the courage to push himself back- wards with his hands, until the slip-knot in the hand- kerchief drew up and caused strangulation. The body was already cold when I arrived, at the same time as the procurator and the examining magistrate. " The procurator, to whom the magistrate had re- lated the somnambulic scene of the preceding day, expressed a desire to see Marie, and I proposed to him to take advantage of what had just taken place to question the girl as to the criminal who had thus executed justice on himself. The magistrates eagerly accepted my proposition. I cut off^ a piece of the handkerchief and wrapped it up in several sheets of paper, which I then tied firmly. " Arrived at the women's quarters, — they had just left the dormitory, — we begged the sister to lend us her room; I signed to Marie to follow us, without saying a word to her, and put her to sleep by merely placing my hand on her forehead. Then I drew the packet from my pocket and put it between her hands. " At that moment the poor girl started on her seat and flung the packet from her with horror, angrily crying out that she would not ' touch that.' Now it is well known that suicides in prisons are kept secret as long as possible ; in the building nothing had as yet transpired as to the tragedy which had taken place; even the sister herself was ignorant of it. 286 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " ' What do you think that this paper contains ? ' I asked when calm had been partially restored. " ' It is something that has been used to kill a man.' " ' A knife, perhaps ; or a pistol? ' " ' No, no, a string. ... I see ... I see . . . it is a neck-handkerchief ... he has hanged him- self . . . But make that gentleman sit down, who is standing beliind me, he is trembling so that his limbs cannot support him.' (This was one of the magistrates, who was so overcome with what he saw, that he was, in fact, trembling in every limb.) " ' Can you tell me when this took place? ' " ' Why, here, you know very well. ... It is a prisoner.' " ' And why was he in prison ? ' " ' For having assassinated a man who had asked to get up in his cart.' "'How did he kill him?' " ' By striking blows with his gov£tJ* " This is the name used in Loir et Cher for a sort of hatchet with a short handle, a broad, long blade turned over at the end like a parrot's beak. It is very much used in this country, especially by coopers and woodmen. In fact it was a gouet that I had suggested in my medico-legal report, as being the instrument probably used by the murderer. " So far Marie's replies had taught us nothing that we did not know before. At this moment the examining magistrate drew me apart, and whispered in my ear that the gouet had not been found. " ' What has been done with this gouet? ' I asked. CLAIRVOYANCE ^87 "'What has been done? . . . wait ... it was thrown into a pool. ... I can see it quite well at the bottom of the water.' " And she described the place where the pool was situated, with sufficient exactness to permit of a search, which was made the same day in the presence of a superintendent of police, and resulted in the discovery of the instrument of crime." Whatever we may think of the possibility of pre- vious knowledge about the suicide, — which Dr. Du- f ay seems not to suppose, — this hypothesis can hardly apply to the finding of the gouet. Neither does telepathy apply to this last, whatever we think about the discovery of the contents of the packet. The instances which I have quoted are experi- mental ones, and I come now to spontaneous illus- trations of at least apparent clairvoyance. Experi- ment determines the conditions which may exclude fraud, but it cannot always be assured that it can obtain the desired phenomena or evidence. Sponta- neous phenomena may exclude the first objection which experiment suggests, though it may not so easily eliminate chance and recrudescent memories. But Dr. Dufay reports some instances which have all the value of experiments while they are entirely spontaneous. He had them from M. Badaire, who had been director at the Normal School, first at Gueret and then at Blois, and they were under the observation of Dr. Cressant, the medical officer who wrote out the report. The subject of the phenomena was a young boy by the name of Janicaud, who was S88 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH afflicted with somnambulism or sleep-walking. This was so bad that he had to be watched for his safet}^, as he would get up and wander about out-of-doors. On one of these occasions the following incident took place, and was followed by similar ones. " One evening about 11 o'clock, Janicaud, having escaped from the dormitory, knocked at the door of my bedroom. " ' I have just arrived from Vendome,' he said, (probably about thirty miles distant on the map), ' and have come to give you the news of your family. M. and Mme. Arnault are well, and your little son has four teeth.' " ' As you have seen Vendome, could you go back again and tell me where they are at present .^^ ' " ' Wait. ... I am there. . . . They are sleep- ing in a room on the first floor ; their bed is at the farther end of the room, to the left. The nurse's bed is to the right, and Henry's cradle close to it.' " The description of the room and the position of the beds were perfectly exact, and the following day I received a letter from my father-in-law telHng me that my child had cut his fourth tooth. *' A few days later, Janicaud came to me at about the same time, telHng me that he had again come from Vendome, and that an accident had happened to the child during the day. My wife, being much startled, anxiously inquired what the accident was. " ' Oh ! do not be frightened, madame, reassure yourself, there will be no serious consequences, what- ever the doctor, who is now with the child, may think. If I had known that I should have caused you so CLAIRVOYANCE 289 much alarm, I should not have spoken of it. It will be nothing.' " The next morning I wrote to my father-in-law to tell him what Janicaud had said, and begged for news of the child by return of post. The answer was that he was perfectly well, and that no accident had taken place. " But in the month of September, when I went home for the holidays, I learnt the whole truth, which my father-in-law, on the advice of the doctor, had hidden from me. He told me that at the time when Janicaud came to tell me that an accident had happened, the doctor did not expect the child to live through the night. During the day the nurse, hav- ing got hold of the key to the cellar, had become completely intoxicated, and the child having been fed by her when in this condition, was seized with violent sickness, which endangered his life for several days. " One night Janicaud suddenly jumped up in bed, and turning to one of his companions said: " ' See, Roullet, how careless you are. I certainly told you to shut the door of the bookbinding shop, but jou did not do it, and a cat, in eating the paste, has just knocked over the dish, which is broken into five pieces.' " Some one went down at once to the workshop, and it was found that what the somnambulist had said was perfectly correct. " The following night he related how he saw on the Gleny road the body of a man, who had been drowned while bathing in the Creuse, and that he was being brought to Gueret in a carriage. Next S90 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH day I made inquiries and heard that an inhabitant of the town had really been drowned the previous day at Gleny, and that his body had been brought to Gueret during the night. But nobody in the house, not even in the town [Blois], had known of the acci- dent the day before." These phenomena are capricious enough, and one cannot help wondering why a power so far-reaching in its acquisition of knowledge could not find some- thing better to do than watching a cat break a dish of paste. But science cannot at present stop its inquiries because the larger secrets of the cosmos are not revealed in these sporadic facts. Its duty is to accept the perplexity and wait for further developments. Dr. Alfred Backman, of Kalmar, Sweden, reports a number of experiments that are attested by various witnesses. The whole chapter might be taken up with them. Some were successful and others not so, while some were partly successful. I shall quote but one of them, however, as it is brief and clear, no explanations being required. " Sub-Lieutenant Werner had lost a little silver revolver, about 3 cm. long, which he valued very much. He lost it in a sandy field, and eight soldiers searched for it in vain for half a day. Some days afterward I hypnotized Anna Samuelsson and went with her, still asleep, to the field, where I told her to search for the revolver. I then asked if she could tell me whether I should succeed in finding it. ' Yes,' she answered, she saw Lieutenant wearing it again. CLAIRVOYANCE ^91 '' Next day I suggested to another young patient, named Cecilia, that when she went away from the mihtary hospital, where we then were, she should go to the spot where the revolver was lying, take it out of the sand, and give it to me the following day. " When she came to me on the following day, she actually brought the revolver with her. Her mother told me that when Cecilia went away from the hos- pital, she walked straight to a very sandy part of the field (which I afterwards fomid was the same place that Anna went to), removed a little sand and found the revolver, which is now again worn by its owner." Mrs. Sidgwick, wife of Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge University, England, has a long arti- cle in the Proceedings of the Society, which collects a large mass of incidents that are interpreted as bear- ing upon the problem of clairvoyance. It is im- possible to quote from it at length, as its material would make several chapters. I can only abbreviate its matter and import and refer readers, who want to ascertain whether it has scientific value, to the record itself. An interesting case comes from a physician in Russia. It has value because the phy- sician was not a believer in anything supernormal, and reports this as his only experience of the kind. It was a Dr. Golinski, of Krementchug. " I am in the habit of dining at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and of sleeping for an hour and a half after the meal. In July, 1888, I lay down on a sofa as usual, and went to sleep about 3.30. I dreamt that the door-bell rang, and that I had 292 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH the usual rathe? disagreeable sensation that I must get up and go to some sick person. Then I found myself transported directly into a little room with dark hangings. To the right of the door leading into the room is a chest of drawers, and on this I see a little paraffin lamp of a special pattern. I am keenly interested in the shape of this little lamp, different from any it has previously happened to me to see. To the left of the door I see a bed, on which lies a woman suffering from severe hemor- rhage. I do not know how I come to know that she has a hemorrhage, but I know it. I examine her, but rather to satisfy my conscience than for any other reason, as I know beforehand how things are, although no one speaks to me. Afterwards I dream vaguely of medical assistance which I give, and then I awake in an unaccustomed manner. Generally I awake slowly, and remain for some minutes in a drowsy state, but this time I awoke almost with a start, as if some one had awakened me. As I awoke I heard a clock strike the half -hour. I asked myself, ' What half -hour is it then ? ' and looking at my watch I saw it was half -past four. " I got up, smoked a cigarette, and walked up and down my room in a state of excitement, thinking over the dream I had just had. It was rather a long time since I had had a case of hemorrhage of any sort among my clients, and I wondered what could have suggested this dream. " About ten minutes after I awoke the door-bell rang, and I was summoned to a patient. Entering the bedroom I was astonished, for I recognized the CLAIRVOYANCE 293 room of which I had just dreamt. The patient was a sick woman, and what struck me especially was the paraffin lamp placed on the chest of drawers exactly in the same place as in my dream, and of the same pattern, which I had never seen before. My aston- ishment was so great that I, so to speak, lost the clear distinction between the past dream and the pres- ent reahty, and, approaching the sick woman's bed, said affirmatively, ' You have a hemorrhage 1 ' only recovering myself when the patient replied, ' Yes, but how do you know it ? ' " Struck with the strange coincidence between my dream and what I saw, I asked the patient when she had decided to send for me. She told me that she had been imwell since the morning. About 1 p. m. a slight hemorrhage commenced and some pain, but she paid no attention to it. The hemorrhage became severe after 2 o'clock, and the patient began to grow anxious. Her husband not being at home she did not know what to do, and lay down, thinking it would pass. Between 3 and 4 o'clock she was still unde- cided and in great anxiety. About 4.30 she decided to send for me. The distance between my house and that of the patient is twenty minutes' walk. " I only know her from having attended her in an illness some time before, and knew nothing of her present state of health. " In a general way I seldom dream, and this is the only dream I ever had which I have always re- membered, on account of its veridical character." The incidents in this case seem to be inattributable to chance coincidence, and being reported by a rep- 294 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH utable physician who was sceptical, have some evi- dential value for the supernormal of the clairvoyant type. The next instance is the experience of Mrs. Alfred Wedgwood, the daughter-in-law of Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, who was an English savant of some repu- tation and the brother-in-law of Charles Darwin. The narrative is given in her own language. " I spent the Christmas holidays with my father- in-law in Queen Anne Street, and in the beginning of January I had a remarkably vivid dream, which I told to him next morning at breakfast. " I dreamt I went to a strange house, standing at the comer of a street. When I reached the top of the stairs I noticed a window opposite with a little colored glass, short muslin blinds running on a brass rod. The top of the ceiling had a window veiled by gathered muslin. There were two small shrubs on a httle table. The drawing-room had a bow- window, with the same blinds ; the library had a polished floor, with the same blinds. " As I was going to a child's party at a cousin's, whose house I had never seen, I told my father-in- law I thought that that would prove to be the house. " On January 10th, I went with my little boy to the party, and by mistake gave the driver a wrong number. When he stopped at No. 20, I had mis- givings about the house, and remarked to the cab- man that it was not a corner house. The servant could not tell me where Mrs. H. lived, and had not a blue-book. Then I thought of my dream, and as a last resource I walked down the street looking up CLAIRVOYANCE 295 for the pecuKar blinds I had observed in my dream. These I met with at No. 50, a comer house, and knocking at the door, was reheved to find that it was the house of which I was in search. " On going up-stairs the room and windows cor- responded exactly with what I had seen in my dream, and the same little shrubs in their pots were stand- ing on the landing. The window in which I had seen the colored glass was hidden by the blind being drawn down, but I learnt, on inquiry, that it was really there." Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood confirms these state- ments and that inquiries were made at the house mentioned to ascertain the truth of incidents not previously known. He states that his daughter-in- law told him of the dream the morning after it oc- curred. A long case is quoted as coming from Mr. William Boyd, a Fellow of the Royal Society. It represents the alleged clairvoyant knowledge of incidents tak- ing place on the sea at a great distance, such as the dressing of the hand of a mate by the surgeon of the ship, accompanied with the vision that the mate had lost some of his fingers, followed by other spe- cific incidents. The story was confirmed on the ar- rival of the ship in port. The incident is too old to quote in detail, but the authority for it is un- usually good. The next instance is reported by a Mr. A. W. Dobbie, an Associate of the Society for Psychical Research, and one who had practised the use of hyp- nosis. He kept a detailed account of his experi- 296 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH merits, and reported them to the Society, and seems to have had the entire confidence of the Council. I quote the case as reported. " Up to the present time this has been the most interesting case I have had. " In the first instance I mesmerized [Miss ] as an experiment whilst I was endeavoring to mes- merize several others. I found an easy subject. I afterwards had occasion to mesmerize her with a view of relieving her from rheumatic pains and cur- ing her sore throat, whether I put her into the mes- meric sleep or not. As with several other patients, I can entirely remove all sensation of feeling from her limbs, so that she can be severely pricked with a needle without experiencing the slightest incon- venience. About the fifth time I mesmerized her it suddenly occurred to me to test her clairvoyant pow- ers, and I was delighted to find that she developed this wonderful faculty. " The following is a verbatim account of the sec- ond time I tested her powers in this respect, April 12th, 1884. There were four persons present during the seance. One of the company wrote down the replies as they were spoken. " Her father was at the time over fifty miles away, but we did not know exaetly where, so I questioned her as follows : ' Can you find your father at the present moment .^^ ' At first she replied that she could not see him, but in a minute or two, she said, ' Oh, yes, now I can see him, Mr. Dobbie.' ' Where is he? ' ' Sitting at a large table in a large room, and there are a lot of people going in and out.' ' What CLAIRVOYANCE 297 is he doing ? ' ' Writing a letter, and there is a book in front of him.' ' Who is he writing to ? ' ' To the newspaper.' Here she paused, and laughingly said, ' Well, I declare, he is writing to the A. B.' [naming a newspaper] . ' You said there was a book there. Can you tell what book it is .^^ ' ' It has gilt letters on it.' ' Can you read them, or tell me the name of the author ? ' She read or pronounced slowly, ' W. L. W.' [giving the full surname of the author]. She answered several minor questions re the furni- ture in the room, and I then said to her, ' Is it any effort or trouble to you to travel in this way ? ' ' Yes, a little; I have to think.' " I now stood behind her, holding a half-crown In my hand, and asked her if she could tell what I had in my hand, to which she replied, ' It is a shilHng.' It seemed as though she could see what was happen- ing miles away easier than she could see what was going on in the room. " Her father returned home nearly a week after- wards, and was perfectly astounded when told by his wife and family what he had been doing on that particular evening, and although previous to that date he was a thorough sceptic as to clairvoyance, he frankly admitted that my clairvoyant was per- fectly correct in every particular. He also informed us that the book referred to was a new one which he had purchased after he had left his home, so that there was no possibility of his daughter guessing that he had the book before him. I may add that the letter in due course appeared in the paper; and I saw and handled the book." 298 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Mr. Dobbie reports several other similar cases. One incident comes from the Bishop of Algowa, and a number of experiments by Dr. Wiltse, who was a member of the Society. But I shall close these incidents by one in Mr. Myers' collection in the same tenor. It came to the attention of the Society through Dr. Minot J. Savage, and was investigated and reported in the Proceedings in great detail. It is corroborated by some twenty or twenty-five wit- nesses. Two boys by the name of Mason, whose father was dead, started to the station to meet their mother and were never afterward seen alive. When the mother returned she supposed the boys would soon be home. This was on Friday. The stepfather was away from home. The next day, Saturday, friends of the family sought for them in Boston, but could not find them. It was March and no one seemed to have thought it probable that the boys would go to the lake that was near. But to quiet the mother's anxiety, some men agreed to fire some cannon over the lake to raise the bodies if there. The lake was also dragged, but nothing of the boys was found. In despair and in spite of the fact that the mother was not a believer in Spiritualism, she suggested that some one go to Boston and consult a clairvoyant, and this was finally decided upon, a friend agreeing to do this who had never seen a medium before. The following is the account of what occurred, in the language of the lady who went to see the clairvoyant. " I arrived in Boston at 12 o'clock. I went, as CLAIRVOYANCE 299 I had been told to do, to the Banner of Light office, and asked there, as a stranger, if they could direct me to some rehable clairvoyant. They directed me to some one on or near Court Street. I found the woman engaged. The gentleman who answered the bell-pull directed me to a clairvoyant on Dix Place. When I arrived at Dix Place I found this woman also engaged, but she directed me to a Mrs. York, on Washington Street. It was about three o'clock. A sitter was leaving as I rang the bell. Mrs. York opened the door herself. When I told her my er- rand, she told me she could not see me till the next day, but on my saying the next day would be too late, she told me to walk into her parlor, and she would go out and take a walk, and on her return would see me. These were the only words she ad- dressed to me, and I am sure she knew nothing of me whatever, where I came from, or what my er- rand was about. I spoke no words with her further than those I have already stated, neither had I ever heard of Mrs. York before, and she knew no one in N. She was gone about fifteen minutes, when she came into the room, and going to the fireplace at once, and with her back to me, and without my speaking one word, she said, ' They went east before they went west.' (The railroad station is east from the house, in which their mother lived, and the lake west. ) She then said, * They saw the fire, and so went to the water.' (It was afterwards found that on this day, Friday afternoon, some men were burning brush near the lake; that was what at- tracted them up there.) She then went on to de- 300 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH scribe the boat-house, with a hole in the side of the boat-house. She then said, ' They went in through this hole in the side.' She described the boat, which she said was a ' narrow boat, painted black,* and said, ' Oh dear, it was never intended that but one person should go into it at a time.' She told of their pulling out a httle way, the younger brother falling into the water first, and the older brother trying to save him, and also said, ' The place where they are is muddy, and they could not come to the surface. Why,' said she, ' it is not the main lake they are in, but the shallow point which connects the main lake, and they are near the shore, and if it was not this time of the year (March) you could almost walk in and pick them up.' She told of the citizens' interest in trying to find them, and said, ' They will not find them; they go too far from the shore; they are on the left of the boat-house, a few feet from the land.' Then I said, ' If they are in the water, they will be found before I can reach home.' She said, ' No, they will not be found before you get there; you will have to go and tell them where they are, and then they will be found within five minutes after you reach the lake.* She made me promise to go with them to the lake. She said, ' They are very near together ; after finding one you will quickly find the other.' I reached Natick at five o'clock. There was a crowd at the station. When I got out on to the platform, some gentlemen said to me, ' Mrs. D., what did the clairvoyant tell you.^^ ' I answered, ' Haven't you found them yet.^^ ' They said no, and then I told them what Mrs. York \ CLAIRVOYANCE 301 had said, and went with them to the lake. In look- ing into the boat-house it was found that the long, narrow boat owned by Mr. Benning Hall, and painted, as she had said, all in black, was missing; this boat, as she had said, ' was to hold one man, and was unsafe occupied by two persons.' (I did not know at the time of my sitting with Mrs. York that Mr. Benning Hall was the owner of such a boat, or that the boat-house was used to shelter a boat of this description. I had never seen such a boat owned by any one ; so this part she did not reach from my mind.) And this boat was found in a cove some distance from the boat-house, a few days after. Neither did I know of the ' hole ' in the boat-house until I reached the lake on this afternoon. Finding that what she said of the boat and the hole in the boat-house was true, I began to think the rest might be true also ; but no one in the crowd, so far as I know, did place any confidence in her statement. I stood on the shore and two boats put off with men holding grappling-irons. I was able to tell them how to direct their course. Three or four strokes of the oars and the elder brother of the boys who were missing, and who was holding one of the grappling-irons, exclaimed, ' I have hold of some- thing.' The men stopped rowing, and he raised the body of the largest boy above the water. In taking the body into the boat, the boat moved a few lengths. They were told to go to the same place where the eldest had been found, and almost immediately brought up the other body. It was not ten minutes after reaching the lake that the boys were found, and S02 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH were being taken home. As Mrs. York had said, they were in a muddy place; their clothing testified to the fact. " The disappearance of the boys in the manner I have described is known to fifty persons now living in Natick. I cannot say how much larger the num- ber is. " She had while in this trance, by using books on the table, showed me the boat-house and the shore so well, that any one from the description could have gone directly to the water and found them. " I asked her how she came by this information. She answered, ' The boys' father told me.' How did she know that the boys' father had been dead several years .f* " The coincidences in this narrative speak for them- selves and require no extended comments from me. It can hardly be called a case of telepathy, in the form in which it is told, and though we might wish to question the integrity of the memory of the nar- rator, as filling in incidents after the discovery of the boys, I hardly think that this hypothesis can be sustained any more easily than a more remarkable one. Possibly the after-events have affected the lan- guage of the incidents told by the medium, but there are too many independent facts in the case to apply a theory of illusion of memory to such a group of incidents. I shall rest from quotation at this point. When it comes to offering a theory of clairvoyance I can- not propose any that I would unquaHfiedly advocate. Such a thing as clairvoyance is not to be admitted CLAIRVOYANCE 303 lightly, and when it is admitted, we cannot maike it intelligible in terms of other familiar and accepted laws of scientific knowledge. We have no analogies within the reach of either physiology or psychology to explain such phenomena. Telepathy has some points of analogy with well-known physical phe- nomena. We can describe the process and conditions of telegraphy and telephony, and they involve the action of a force or motion at definite points and their transmission, supposedly, by vibrations through an undulating medium. But such a thing as see- ing objects and events at any distance from the sub- ject and without the normal impressions of sense is a phenomenon that presents no intelligible analo- gies with ordinary experience, and the term can only appear as one to name and classify a group of facts and not to explain them or to indicate the process by which they are effected. The explanation must be sought in their articulation with a larger class of phenomena for which we can find some clue to their meaning, and these with the known laws of mental action. As a prehminary to the extension of the inquiries necessary to reduce clairvoyance to something intelh- gible, I may be permitted to refer to some incidents quoted in my previous book. Science and a Future Life. The reader of that work may remember that I quoted (pp. 184-188) a remarkable set of in- cidents that were evoked from the " control " of Mrs. Piper, who called himself a Dr. Phinuit, by the mere presentation of a closed box with articles in it not known by the sitter, nor was it known at the time 804 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH from whom thej came. The names and incidents elicited, along with the right naming of the articles in the box, were so beyond chance that no intelligent man would suggest that theory to account for them. The sitter, a lady, did not think that the knowledge was acquired from spirits, as no statement to that effect was volunteered by the " control." But Dr. Richard Hodgson adds to this incident two experi- ments in which he had taken part with Mrs. Piper and in which the apparent clairvoyance of a like kind to that mentioned was associated with the state- ment that the information came from a discarnate spirit and that " spirit " was correctly named, that is, a deceased person was named who would naturally have known the facts. This information, however, was not volunteered, but came in response to an in- quiry as to the source of it. The last case quoted shows a similar claim. I quoted it for this very purpose. The reader will notice that no trace of an explicable source of the information was given about the incidents associated with the drowned boys, until the clairvoyant was asked how she came by the information, and her reply was, as above, " The hoys^ father told tw^," and he was deceased several years. I know two other cases similar, where there was no trace of the source except in certain incidental circumstances which were not compatible with the knowledge of the appar- ent source. Persons familiar, also, with this type of phenomena will recognize the fact that spiritistic elements are generally associated with clairvoyant incidents. The same is apparent even in some of CLAIRVOYANCE 305 the phantasms of the dead or dying. They are only hints, however, and we must collect much more mate- rial and perform many more experiments before we can feel assured of such a clue, and when it is found it may leave us still in some perplexity, though it gives intelligible articulation to the phenomena. CHAPTER IX PEEMONITIONS A premonition, as technically defined by the psy- chical researcher, is " a supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the future." The common term " presentiment " is often used in the same sense, but without any implication that it involves an ex- ceptional explanation. Prediction is also a similar term. But premonition has been adopted for techni- cal usage and implication of a distinction implying the supernormal. Whether any such a thing as causally determined premonitions occur or not is not now the question, but the definition of an alleged phenomenon, which shall receive that denomination, if it be a proved fact, just to indicate its unusual character. There are no phenomena that can so effectively excite scepticism and philosophic confusion as al- leged premonitions. If we could dismiss the alle- gations as we can many ill-founded impressions in experience we should not be troubled with any prob- lem, and if some well-authenticated instances of ap- parent intimations of the future had not been col- lected together we could easily apply the old argu- ment based on imperfect observation and illusion. And it would be much the same with a few isolated instances not involving details beyond chance and 306 PREMONITIONS 307 guessing. But apparently there is a mass of evi- dence on hand which forbids scoffing, even though we ultimately discredit the claims made for premonition. The difficulty that any complicated premonition pre- sents is in the sense of fatahty that it suggests in the order of the world, and we have been so long accustomed to the idea of freedom and responsibihty that we naturally revolt at the claim. Besides, we have not yet found a means to bridge the enormous chasm involved between ordinary knowledge and that which would be required to determine a premonition. However this may be, it will be necessary to first look at the facts. Mr. Myers, in one of his articles on the " Sub- liminal Consciousness," begins it with a type of phe- nomena that border on those of clairvoyance, but are not that clearly as they appear. They are a borderland type that, if they open a dim vista of human faculty, certainly show some links between the normal method of acquiring knowledge and the more remarkable process of clairvoyance. I shall quote a few of his instances of this kind. The first is one from a man whom I have quoted before, the Rev. P. H. Newnham, whose experiments in telep- athy are classical. " I have on many occasions," says this gentleman, " throughout the last thirty-five years at least, ex- perienced the sensation of a soundless voice speaking words distinctly into my ear from the outside of me. Whenever this has been the case, the information or ad\dce given has invariably proved correct. " I distinguish this phenomenon clearly from the 308 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ordinary forms of ' presentiment.' This voice is distinctly something ab extra. In presentiments, if certain words seem to come, they come from within, and are (so to speak) spoken voicelessly by myself, just as in verbal reading to yourself. " I never pay any attention to these co-called ' presentiments.' I have had plenty of them, and find them more often false than true. " But when this voice comes it never fails. " In July, 1858 (I believe, but it may have been June, 1857), I was visiting friends at Tunbridge Wells, and went one evening entomologizing. As I crossed a stile into a field, on my way to a neigh- boring wood, the voice distinctly said in my right ear, ' You'll find " Chaonia " on that oak.' (This was a very scarce moth, which I had never seen before, and which most assuredly I had never con- sciously thought of seeing.) There were several oaks in the field, but I intuitively walked up to one, straight to the off side of it, and there was the moth indicated." Mr. Myers quotes two similar instances whose ac- count is too long to repeat, and then one shorter instance from Dr. Richard Hodgson, Secretary of the American Society, that closely followed the read- ing of Mr. Newnham's story. This I can quote, and will not imply by it more than an interesting coincidence, though the mental state which accom- panies it, taken with what we know of other and more important supernormal phenomena, has its psycho- logical interest. "Yesterday morning (September 13th, 1895), \ PREMONITIONS 309 just after breakfast, I was strolling alone along one of the garden paths of Leckhampton House, re- peating aloud to myself the verses of a poem. I became temporarily obHvious to my garden surround- ings, and regained my consciousness of them sud- denly to find myself brought to a stand, in a stoop- ing position, gazing intently at a five-leaved clover. On careful examination I found about a dozen speci- mens of five-leaved clover as well as several speci- mens of four-leaved clover, all of which probably came from the same root. Several years ago I was interested in getting extra-leaved clovers, but I have not for years made any active search for them, though occasionally my conscious attention, as I walked along, has been given to appearances of four- leaved clover which proved on examination to be de- ceptive. The peculiarity of yesterday's ' find ' was that I discovered myself, with a sort of shock, stand- ing still and stooping down, and afterward realized that a five-leaved clover was directly under my eyes. I plucked some of the specimens, and showed them at once to Mr. and Mrs. Myers, and explained how I had happened to find them. Clover plants were thickly clustered in the neighborhood, but I failed on looking to find any other specimens. The incident naturally suggests the arresting of my subliminal attention." A number of similar experiences appears in Mr. Myers' list and introduces his remarks on Precog- nition, which can include the phenomena of premoni- tion. But, as Dr. Hodgson's remark at the end of his narrative indicates, the phenomena, if we are to SIO ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH suppose anything more than chance coincidence, are due to subliminal and hyperaesthetic conditions, and are more nearly associated with clairvoyance than with premonition. They anticipate normal sensation of present objects or events, while premonition antici- pates the existence of objects and events. When the premonition takes place, if it occurs at all, the facts which it antedates are not yet born. But I quote the facts here as intimations either of clairvoyance or subliminal hyperaesthesia that may imply mental information anticipating and predicting future events from the tendencies coming within the range of that knowledge. I shall, therefore, turn to inci- dents that answer more nearly to the phenomena defined and that cannot in any way be explained by hyperaesthesia or clairvoyance. The following incident was reported by a gentle- man, and confirmed by the subject of the experience to the Boston Transcript, and investigated by Dr. Hodgson. " The following incident may interest some of the readers of the Transcript. A few weeks ago I had occasion to require the services of a dentist, and when I went to his office at the time appointed I found him in a very excited state of mind, caused, he told me, by a very strange occurrence. The office is a pleasant room facing the Common on Tremont Street, and in one corner, the farthest from the windows, the den- tist had a small work-bench, partitioned off from the rest of the room, and there had his copper vessel which he used when vulcanizing the rubber for the setting of false teeth. He had been working at a \ kX^ '" RETROSPECT AND VATICINATION 423 Andrew Lang, than whom the English language hardly has an abler critic and sceptic, in reviewing Mr. Myers' Human Personality/ and Its Survival of Bodily Death, says : " I myself, regarding the word ' matter ' and ' spirit ' as mere metaphysical counters with which we pay ourselves, think (re- ligious faith apart) that human faculty lends a fairly strong presumption in favor of the survival of human consciousness. " To myself, after reading the evidence, it ap- pears that a fairly strong presumption is raised in favor of a ' phantasmogenetic agency ' set at work, in a vague, unconscious way, by the deceased, and I say this after considering the adverse arguments of Mr. Podmore, for example, in favor of telepathy from living minds, and all hypotheses of hoaxing, exaggerative memory, mal-observation, and so forth — not to mention the popular nonsense about ' What is the use of it? ' ' Why is it permitted .^^ ' and the rest of it. ' What is the use of argon ? * * Why are cockroaches permitted.^ ' " To end with a confession of opinion : I entirely agree with Mr. Myers and Hegel that we, or many of us, are in something, or that something is in us, which ' does not know the bonds of time, or feel the manacles of space.' " Sir William Crookes, the discoverer of Crookes tubes, one of the ablest physicists in England, also says : " No incident in my scientific career is more widely known than the part I took many years ago in certain psychical researches. Thirty years have passed since I published an account of experiments 424 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH tending to show that outside our scientific knowledge there exists a force exercised by intelHgence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals. To stop short in any research that bids fair to widen the gates of knowledge, to recoil from fear of diffi- culty or adverse criticism, is to bring reproach on science. There is nothing for the investigator to do but to go straight on, ' to explore up and down, inch by inch, with the taper of reason ; to follow the light wherever it may lead, even should it at times resemble a will-o'-the-wisp.' " Dr. Cesare Lombroso, the physiologist and crim- inologist, says : " There is a great probability now given us through psychical and spiritistic researches, that there is a continued existence of the soul after death, preserving a weak identity, to which the per- sistent soul can add new life and growth from the surrounding media." Mr. Huxley, whose sceptical tendency no one will deny, says: " In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world — the value of the evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the course of things — are matters which lie as much within the province of science as any other question about the existence and powers of the various forms of living and conscious activity." There is no good reason in this age for asking what utility any such belief as immortality may have. No one can easily defend the inutility of any truth the human mind is capable of discovering. Human nature may abuse all its utilities, but this is not to RETROSPECT AND VATICINATION 426 deny their value for the rational man. Besides, if the facts force us to admit the truth of anything, we cannot present scepticism of its utility as an argu- ment against its truth. That resource is the last refuge of a defeated philosophy, and comes very well from those who do not feel the struggle for existence against them and who are able to shift the burdens and sorrows of life upon other shoulders. Besides, it is usually a reflection of the attempt to save the moral ideals created by another belief when it has perished. We do not become stoical regarding a future life until we abandon it and try to save the ideals based on it. We may find that the generation that follows will not have that strenuous warfare to fight, but surrender at once to the contentment of present passions and their material ends. I shall not dispute that many evils have been associated with the form which the belief took in many minds. But this same qualification can be made of any belief, physical, ethical, political, or religious. The point is not to deny the value of all hope, but to give such hopes as facts may prove we have a right to hold, that rational form and color which will make them as balanced a motive for conduct as any earthly object may have. When any truth leads to evil results we concentrate our efforts to qualify it, not to deny it. We must remember that the question has always been put by the best men, and it will take the best to answer it. For more than a century Heine's terrible query and answer have represented the prevailing sentiment of intelligent men. 426 ENIGMAS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " Sagt mir, was bedeutet der Mensch ? Woher ist er kommen ? Wo geht er hin ? Wer wohnt dort oben auf goldenen Sternen ? " Es murmeln die Wogen ihr ew'ges Gemurmel, Es wehet der Wind, es fliehen die Wolken, Es blinken die Sterne, gleichgiltig und kalt, Und ein Narr wartet auf Antwort." « Oh, tell me now what meaning has man? Or whence he comes, and whither he goes ? Who dwells beyond upon the golden stars ? « The waves still murmur their eternal song, The winds sigh low, the clouds pass by, And twinkle the stars indifferent and cold, And only a fool awaits an answer." The serious interrogation of nature promises to give an answer to the eternal question, and he will be a fool who does not heed it, though he must be wise to avoid any abuses to which his knowledge may expose him. Humanity and pity that would share with others the accidents of sorrow will always de- mand, angrily perhaps, some hope of redemption, not for self, but for those victims of sin and mis- fortune whose share in the world's unpleasant work has been larger than the more successful. We who have our livings guaranteed and who have aristo- cratic society for our enjoyment may well be indif- ferent to the hope of a future existence; for we have an intellectual and social life that serves as a good substitute for hope. But " the dull millions that toil f oredone at the wheel of labor " and have no rest RETROSPECT AND VATICINATION 427 or culture, which are the priceless endowments of those who directly or indirectly exploit them, must always invite the sympathy of the humane ; and when no physical help is possible, the hope of another life, " where the wicked cease from troubhng and the weary are at rest," may temper one's moralities to the harsh treatment of nature, and mollify the pas- sionate cry of injustice. We must not forget, how- ever, the dangers of such a consolation. It may lead to a sickly resignation and the loss of that courage which is nobler than any wincing complaints against the afflictions of the world. Nevertheless, it will be something for the best minds and wills to feel as- sured that all the influences which hope can give in the achievements of earthly ends may extend their beneficence to a larger field of expectation, and if science can do thus as much for the future as evo- lution has done for the past we can read Heine's poetic indictment with more composure, and expect all noble ideals to secure from the proof of a future life an inspiration which " breaks out of the cir- cumambient eternity to color with its own hues man's little islet of time." THE END. FEB 26 1906 i