Chapter IX. with regard to hallucinations of a certain well-defined

type coinciding with the death of the person represented. The conclusion there reached is that such coincidences are far too numerous to be ascribed to chance. This part of the evidence cannot therefore be summarily dismissed, as suggested by more than one recent critic, on the plea that hallucinations which coincide with a death may be set off against hallucinations which occur without any coincidence, and both alike be regarded as purely subjective and without significance. Our own estimate of the probabilities is, of course, provisional, and may ultimately prove to be wide of the mark. But, meanwhile, it is at least proof against assault by conjectural statistics or the _obiter dicta_ of amateur psychologists.

But in fact the criticism commonly made is not that, happening as described, visions and hallucinations happened by chance; but that they did not happen as described. This objection deserves careful consideration. It must, I think, be admitted that a proportion, perhaps a large proportion, even of the cases obtained at first-hand are so far inaccurate as to have comparatively small value for scientific purposes; and of the residue, in which the central fact of an unusual subjective experience on the part of the percipient and its coincidence with some external event is fairly well established, it is possible that the details are frequently--and where the record is not made until some years after the event, generally--untrustworthy. In order to estimate the nature and probable extent of these defects, it is proposed briefly to pass in review the various kinds of error to which testimony is liable, and to note their bearings on the question at issue.

_Errors of Observation._

Errors of observation are here of very little importance. The thing to be observed is, of course, the percipient's own sensations. In subsequent conversation he may exaggerate the exceptional nature of the impression; but he can hardly make a mistake at the time in observing what is purely subjective. If a man calls green what we call red, we may conclude that he is colour-blind; and if he asserts that he sees a human figure where we see none, that he is hallucinated; but in neither case have we warrant for saying that he is making an erroneous statement about his own sensations.

_Errors of Inference._

But his interpretation of what he sees is a different matter. Not indeed that the mistake commonly made of taking a hallucination at the time for a figure of flesh and blood, and subsequently for a hypothetical entity of another kind, directly affects the percipient's testimony. So long as the witness accurately describes what he saw, it matters little whether he believes in telepathic hallucinations, or in black magic, ghosts, or the Himalayan Brothers. But there are one or two errors of inference of sufficient importance to deserve notice.

A real figure seen under exceptional circumstances may at the time or in the light of subsequent events be regarded as a hallucination. Such a mistake is, as a rule, possible only out of doors; and the commonest form of it is when a figure is seen by the percipient resembling some friend believed to be at a distance, or in circumstances which make it difficult to suppose that the figure was of flesh and blood. A curious instance came under my notice recently. It was reported to me that a lady had seen in a certain provincial town the ghost of a friend at about the time of her death. The figure, accompanied by another figure, was seen in broad daylight at a distance of a few feet only; it was clearly recognised, and the proof of its non-reality lay in the complete absence of recognition in return. It was subsequently ascertained that the friend in question had actually been present in the flesh, with a companion, at the spot where the figures were seen, but that for sufficient reasons she desired to avoid recognition. Her death within a few days of the encounter was merely an odd coincidence.

Another kind of erroneous inference is worth noting. Cases are not infrequently quoted, as presumably telepathic, of a dream or vision embodying information demonstrably not within the conscious knowledge of the percipient. The inference that he cannot have obtained the information by normal means is clearly unsound, unless it can be shown that it was impossible for the information to have been received unconsciously. For it is well established that intelligence, even of events closely affecting the percipient, may enter through the external organs of sense and lie latent for days before emerging into consciousness. It is obvious that, for instance, many of the cases quoted in which an invalid became aware of news (_e.g._, of the death of a relative) which had been studiously withheld from him by those around may be thus explained. Whispers heard in sleep, or hints unconsciously received, may have betrayed the secret.[73]

_Errors of Narration._

Of much greater importance than errors of observation or inference are those due to defects either in narration or memory. Deliberate deception amongst educated persons is no doubt comparatively rare, though it would perhaps be unwise to hold out any pecuniary inducement for the production of evidence. But there are those, like Colonel Capadose in Mr. Henry James' story _The Liar_, who tell ghost stories for art's sake, and on a slender basis of fact build up a large superstructure of fiction. And there are many more who, with a natural and almost pardonable desire to appear as the hero, or at least the _raconteur_, of a good story, or from the mere love of the marvellous, allow themselves to exaggerate the coincidences, adjust the dates, elaborate the details, or otherwise improve the too bare facts of an actual experience. This kind of embellishment, however, is probably more frequent in second-hand accounts, where the narrator speaks with less sense of responsibility, and, it may be added, of reality.

Again, a common form of inaccuracy is to quote as the experience of a friend one of those weird stories which are passed on from mouth to mouth in ordinary society--the inconvertible currency of psychical research. We all know these old friends--at a distance, for no one has ever succeeded in making their nearer acquaintance. There is the ghost at No. 50 B---- Square; the driver of the dream-hearse, recognised a year later in a lift, which fell straightway, with all its passengers, to the bottom of the hotel; the Form which accompanies the priest, or Quaker, or godly merchant to save him from robbery on his lonely nocturnal journeyings; the young lady who took part in some _tableaux vivants_ whilst her body was lying cold in death--and all the rest of the phantom throng. Only a few months ago I heard one of them--it was the ghost of the lift--from the son of a doctor, who assured me that the incident occurred to one of his father's patients, and gave me the name of the foreign hotel which had been the scene of the disaster.[74]

Sometimes a story is improved by the narrator that it may the better serve for instruction and edification. This tendency is especially liable to distort the evidence in cases connected with death. It must be remembered that though we may view a coincident hallucination, for instance, as merely an instance of an idea transferred from a _living_ mind, to the percipient it frequently represents the spirit of the dead. From a certain class of witnesses the account of such an incident is as little to be trusted as the text of an apocryphal gospel. It inevitably becomes a _Tendenz-schrift_, which reflects not the facts as they occurred, but the narrator's conception of what the facts ought to have been.

It is not necessary to dwell on these sources of error, for they are probably apparent to all; and to give illustrative cases would be superfluous, and perhaps invidious. But it is important to observe that stories so improved, whether from a desire to reinforce some theological tenet, or from the mere love of sensation, are apt to betray their origin in many different ways. Narrators of this kind rarely content themselves with the finer touches; the added ornaments are apt to be gross and palpable; the "spirit" will be made to speak words of warning or comfort; to intimate his testamentary dispositions; or even--in somewhat bolder flight of fancy--to leave a solid memento behind him. Now the authentic phantom is seldom either dramatic or edifying.

_Errors of Memory._

More insidious and more difficult to guard against are errors of memory. There is a natural and almost inevitable tendency to dramatic unity and completeness which leads to the unconscious suppression of some details, and the insertion of others. Probably of all errors due to this cause a nice adjustment of the dates is the commonest. In perhaps the majority of second-hand cases, and in some of the more remote first-hand narratives, the coincidence is said to be exact to the minute. "_At that very moment my friend passed away_" is a common phrase. As a matter of fact, in the best attested recent cases it can rarely be shown that the coincidence is precise, and the impression frequently follows the death by some hours. But there is risk also of the actual transformation of the experience itself. A dream after the lapse of years will be recalled as a hallucination,[75] a vague feeling of discomfort as a vivid emotion, or even a mental vision; a hallucination not recognised at the moment will in the retrospect seem to have been identified with some person who died at about that time; and details, such as clothes worn or words spoken by the phantom, will be borrowed from later knowledge and read back into the image preserved in the memory. There will further be a gradual simplifying and rounding off of the incident, a deepening of the main lines, and a suppression of what is not obviously relevant or coherent. With many persons there can be no doubt that this process is almost, if not wholly, unconscious; and it need hardly be said that in that very fact lies the special danger against which we have to guard.[76]

As an instance of the gradual approximation of dates, I may cite a case recorded in the _Proceedings of the American S.P.R._ (pp. 401, 527). The narrator wrote to Dr. Hodgson:--"I once dreamed that W. T. H. was dead; and the same night he was thrown down several feet on to an engine, ... when he was taken up it was thought he was dead." From later inquiries it was ascertained that the accident did indeed occur as alleged--but a week or ten days after the dream![77] As an illustration of a different kind of metamorphosis, a case may be given which I recently received from a lady and her daughter--an account of a "ghost" seen twenty-five years ago by the latter and her nurse. The younger lady described to me the figure seen; the mother told me that she had received a similar description from both nurse and daughter at the time of the incident. Both ladies were clear-headed and sensible witnesses, and it was impossible to doubt that they believed what they said. But in her childish diary, which the younger lady kindly unearthed for my inspection, the only entry referring to the matter--an entry written in pencil and obviously as an afterthought--ran: "Ellen saw a ghost." If the diarist had herself shared the experience, it is difficult to believe that even the modesty natural to her age and sex would have withheld her from recording the fact for her private glorification.

It would be easy to multiply cases of this kind. But those who demand most proof of the action of telepathy will probably be least exacting of evidence for the untrustworthiness of ancient memories. As a matter of fact, we have the evidence of statistics to show that the imagination does tend after a certain lapse of time to magnify coincidences in matters of this kind, and even to invent coincidences where none existed. It will be shown in Chapter IX., in the discussion on the results obtained from an inquiry into the distribution of sensory hallucinations, that whereas non-coincidental hallucinations tend to be forgotten after the passing of a few years, the records of coincidental hallucinations--or at least of those which are alleged to have coincided with the death of the person seen--are proportionately more frequent ten years ago than at the present time, the inference being that a certain number of coincidences have been unconsciously improved or invented in the interval.

_Pseudo-presentiment._

In a letter published in _Mind_ (April 1888) Professor Royce, of Harvard, U.S.A., hazarded a hypothesis that there may occur "instantaneous and irresistible hallucinations of memory which make it seem to one that something which now excites or astonishes him has been prefigured in a recent dream, or in the form of some other warning." In support of that hypothesis Professor Royce appeals to the analogy of the well-known cases of double memory,--the impression of having at some previous time looked on a scene now present, or heard a conversation now taking place; and to two or three instances of undoubted hallucination of memory amongst the insane, recorded by Krafft-Ebing and Kraepelin. As regards the latter, it is sufficient to remark that the hallucinations occurred to persons whose minds were admittedly diseased; that the hallucinations themselves were apparently slow of growth, whereas the hypothesis requires that they should be more or less instantaneous; and that in other respects they do not present by any means a perfect parallel to the presumably telepathic cases with which he compares them. In default, therefore, of more precise analogies, the hypothesis of pseudo-presentiment must be regarded as, at best, a plausible guess. And even if it were fully substantiated it would only, as pointed out by Mr. Gurney (_Mind_, July 1888), apply to certain classes of telepathic cases, and those the weakest from the evidential standpoint. At most the theory would account for dreams and indefinite impressions of various kinds not mentioned beforehand. In some cases of this kind, and in a large class of so-called "prophetic" dreams, I am inclined to regard Mr. Royce's explanation as possibly true, in the modified form suggested by Dr. Hodgson (_Proc. American S.P.R._, pp. 540 _et seq._)--_i.e._, if it is restricted to cases where there is a vague memory of some actual dream or other impression, bearing a more or less remote resemblance to the event; in other words, if we assume an illusion rather than a hallucination of memory. But it need hardly be said that no serious investigator would treat the uncorroborated accounts of dreams and vague feelings of this kind as evidence for anything whatever. To extend the hypothesis, as Professor Royce suggests, to cases where there is evidence that the percipient's experience was mentioned beforehand, is to suppose not one kind of pseudo-memory, but two,--a pseudo-memory on the part of the percipient that he has had a certain subjective experience, and a pseudo-memory on the part of some other person that this experience was mentioned to him before the news of the event to which it related. In recent cases, at any rate, the assumption of a double mistake of this kind seems unwarranted.[78] And to apply this explanation to cases of actual sense-hallucination involves even more violent improbabilities. It would require far more evidence than Professor Royce can offer to make it credible that a man on hearing of the death of a friend should straightway be capable of imagining that at a definite hour and in a particular place he had seen an apparition of that friend, when in fact he had had no experience of the kind. It is remarkable that Mr. Royce does not himself appear to have realised the distinction between the two kinds of impressions.

_Precautions against Error._

We have now to consider by what methods the various defects incident to testimony on these matters may be best eliminated. As the evidence upon which reliance is placed will be illustrated by the examples quoted hereafter, it will not be necessary to dwell at length here upon the precautions taken. The testimony at first-hand of the actual witnesses, it need hardly be said, is to be desired in any investigation; but in the case of phenomena which are at once stimulating to the imagination, and, as being novel, have no recognised standard of probability by which narrator or auditor can check deviations from the truth, no other evidence is worthy of consideration.[79] It will be seen that in all the cases here quoted the witness, or one of the witnesses, has furnished an account of his experience written by himself;[80] and it is worth noting that the very act of writing such an account to serve the purpose of a systematic inquiry is calculated to inspire the percipient with a sense of responsibility, and to lead him to weigh his words with precision. I may add that by the courtesy of our informants we have in most cases been enabled to question them orally on the details of their experience.[81]

But, for reasons already given, no case should be suffered to rest upon a single memory. It is of the highest importance, therefore, to obtain the corroborative testimony of persons who were cognisant of the occurrence of the impression before the news of the corresponding event. When this is not to be obtained, evidence of some unusual action on the part of the percipient, such as the taking of a journey, or the putting on of mourning, may be accepted as collateral proof of the reality of his impression. But, as we have already seen, the evidence of the attesting witnesses is liable to the same errors which affect the testimony of the percipient; and the evidence most to be desired is of a kind exempt from these weaknesses--that of a letter or memorandum written before the news. In a large proportion of the narratives dealt with, it is asserted that such a letter was written, or such a memorandum made. Unfortunately, this alleged documentary evidence is rarely forthcoming. It is possible that in some cases this statement is merely a conventional dramatic tag,--an addition made unconsciously and in perfect good faith to round off the story.[82] It cannot, however, I think, be regarded as surprising either that a letter or note was not written at the time, or that, if written, it should not have been preserved. Sensory hallucinations--to take the most striking instance--though unusual are not extremely rare experiences; most educated persons are perfectly familiar with the fact of their occurrence and regard them (in most cases rightly) as purely subjective, the products of some transient cerebral disturbance, as little worthy of record as a headache or a bilious attack. Often, probably, the telepathic hallucination is indistinguishable from the mass of purely subjective experiences of the same kind; and even should it be recognised at the time as exceptional, the want of leisure, the fear of ridicule, even the dislike of seeming to admit to himself the possibility of his experience having a sinister significance, would probably deter the percipient from writing about it.[83] It is much more likely that he would speak of it to an intimate friend, should opportunity occur. And when in the rare conjunction of an exceptional experience, adequate leisure, and a sympathetic correspondent, or the habit of writing a diary, the letter is actually written or the note made, the chances which militate against its preservation are many. Few persons will take a general and impersonal (in other words, a scientific) interest in occurrences of this kind. Their own isolated experience may possess a deep and abiding interest for themselves, and, less certainly, for their friends; an interest, however, which is quite compatible with the treatment of the attesting record as waste paper. But unless it can be used to illustrate or support a theory of a future life, they seldom regard a "ghost story" as having any value other than that derived from the personal environment. It appears, indeed, to possess for most little more significance than the recital of an extraordinary run of luck at cards, or a fortunate escape from a railway accident, between which it is commonly sandwiched. Again, few persons realise the high value of contemporary documentary evidence in matters of the kind; there are many who would probably share the views of a courteous correspondent, who, after sending me condensed copies of some contemporary memoranda, wrote in answer to my inquiries:--"I have not got the originals; I destroyed them immediately I sent them (_i.e._, the copies) to you, because I knew they would be more permanently preserved and recorded; being authenticated to Professor Barrett and you, there was no further need of them." And even when they escape immediate destruction the letters may, as in cases reported to us, be "washed out" or burnt; or may survive the perils of flood and fire only to be mislaid, so that they cannot be found without a more thorough search than the courtesy of our correspondents can induce them to make. Notwithstanding these various adverse chances, it will be found that many of the narratives which follow are actually attested by contemporary documentary evidence.

When the great mass of narratives has been carefully examined and tested in the light of the considerations above set forth, and when all those which are remote in date, or for some other reason suspect, have been eliminated, there will be found to remain an important body of testimony. And of this sifted residue, though we cannot predicate of any single narrative that it accurately represents the facts, or that the coincidence with which it deals was not purely casual, yet looking at the cases as a whole, we may feel a reasonable assurance that in their essential features the facts are correctly reported, and that the coincidences are not due to chance.

I may conclude this chapter by calling attention to an argument of a different kind, on which Mr. Gurney,[84] in reviewing the material amassed chiefly in this country, laid considerable stress, and in which he has been followed by an independent observer, Professor Royce, dealing with narratives received from correspondents in America.[85] Both these investigators have pointed out, and probably all who make an equally careful and dispassionate study of the evidence will agree with them, that the phenomena vouched for in the best-attested narratives form a true natural group. They are manifestly not the products of folk-lore, nor of popular superstition, nor of the mere love of the marvellous. They are singularly free from the more sensational and bizarre features--dramatic gestures or speech on the part of the phantasms, prophetic warnings, movement of objects, etc.--which are conspicuous in second-hand narratives. If these accounts were purely fictitious, it would be difficult to conceive by what process, coming from persons of widely separated social grades, of various degrees of education, and of different nationalities, they could have been moulded to present such strong internal resemblances; resemblances consisting not merely in the possession of many common features, but in the absence of others which, by their frequent occurrence in admittedly fictitious accounts, are proved to be the natural fruits of the unrestrained imagination. This undesigned unanimity is strong evidence that the restraint operating throughout has been the restraint of fidelity to fact, and that the narratives themselves owe little to the imagination, and much to their reflection of genuine experience.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 71: Of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R., published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., three or four parts are published yearly. The _Journal_, which appears monthly, contains a record of recent cases of interest, unaccompanied, for the most part, by any critical commentary, and is privately printed for circulation amongst members and associates of the Society. Any reader, however, desirous of studying the subject may procure any number of the _Journal_ referred to in this book on application at the Rooms of the S.P.R., 19 Buckingham St., Adelphi, W.C. Of the foreign periodicals referred to in the text, perhaps the most important is the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, edited by Dr. Dariex, and published by Germer Baillière et Cie., Paris. Cases of interest are also to be found in _Sphinx_, a German periodical, to be obtained through Kegan Paul & Co.; in the _Revue Spirite_ (Paris: 24 Rue des Petits-Champs); and elsewhere.]

[Footnote 72: Professor C. Lloyd Morgan in _Mind_, 1887, p. 282.]

[Footnote 73: See the case recorded by Miss X. (_Proc. S.P.R._, vol. v. pp. 507, 508). In this instance Miss X. saw in the crystal a notice of a friend's death in the form of an extract from the obituary column of the _Times_, in which journal she had almost certainly seen the news, without perceiving it, the day before. There is a dream recorded in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. pp. 687, 688, which may probably be explained as the emergence in dream of intelligence unconsciously received a few hours before.]

[Footnote 74: I have before me as I write one case of the kind which will serve as a sample. A told us the story, and induced B to write to us about it. B informed us that he heard it from his brother C, a F.R.S., who had received it from D, to whom it was told by E; who had it from the lips of F, "who was a visitor at the house where the occurrence took place." We wrote to D, who referred us to two sources of information, G and H. G wrote in reply to our letter that he heard the story from a stranger at a dinner-party "about three years ago," and promised further inquiries. H referred us to J and K. Our letter to K was answered by his cousin L, who wrote that she had heard it from M, "who got it from some one who was present," and further inquiries were again promised. It is needless to add that in cases of this kind the story, like a will-o'-the-wisp, ever recedes as we advance, until it ends with the nameless stranger at some dinner long since gone "away in the Ewigkeit."]

[Footnote 75: There is, as Mr. Gurney has pointed out, a converse error to be guarded against--viz., the gradual effacement of the lines of an impression, so that an actual waking hallucination has in some instances come to be regarded, after a long interval, as only a dream.]

[Footnote 76: A good illustration of this kind of embellishment, in a case recorded at second-hand, will be found in the footnote on a case in Chapter XII.]

[Footnote 77: So in a case given in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, vol. ii. pp. 5-10, we have an extract from the log-book of the _Jacques-Gabriel_, which records that the captain, mate, and another man when at sea heard, on the 17th July 1852, the sound of a woman's voice crying. In a marginal note on the log-book the captain adds that on reaching port they learnt of the death of the mate's wife, "_on the same day and at the same hour_." But the official register shows that the death took place on the 16_th June_ 1852.]

[Footnote 78: That such a pseudo-memory on the part of a person not professing to be the actual percipient is possible after a long interval appears to be shown by the account just cited of the "ghost" seen by the nurse in a foreign hotel. But we have no evidence that a memory hallucination of this kind could be, as demanded by the theory, of instantaneous or very rapid growth; or that any verbal suggestion could intercalate a false picture into a series of still recent and unimpaired memories.]

[Footnote 79: Second-hand narratives have, however, a value of their own, as shown later; for by taking note of the features which occur commonly in such cases, but are absent from the best attested first-hand narratives, we obtain a valuable standard of comparison by which to check aberrations of memory.]

[Footnote 80: An apparent exception to this statement will be found in Nos. 45 and 46, Chapter VII., and elsewhere, where the account is furnished not by the actual percipient, but by a person to whom the percipient related his experience before he knew of its correspondence with fact. The evidence in such cases, it should be pointed out, is as good as first-hand; indeed, where, as in Nos. 45 and 46, the actual percipient was illiterate and the narrator educated, it may be regarded as better than first-hand.]

[Footnote 81: This part of the work has been undertaken in this country by Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. E. Gurney, Mr. F. W. H. Myers, myself, and others; in America, chiefly by Professor Royce and Dr. Hodgson.]

[Footnote 82: In the _Times_ of the 6th January 1893 there appeared a letter from a well-known writer, narrating how in 1851 he had received a description of the sea-serpent from a lady who had watched its movements for some half-hour in a small bay on the coast of Sutherlandshire. So far the story is on a par with any of our own second-hand ghost stories. But the writer goes on to say that the serpent had rubbed off some of its scales on the rocks; that a few of these scales, of the size and shape of scallop-shells, were for some years in his own possession, but that when he searched amongst his curios, in order to show these scales to Professor Owen, they were not to be found. The humble investigators of the S.P.R. have occasionally found themselves in the same position as the illustrious anatomist.]

[Footnote 83: See, for example, the case quoted in Chapter X., No. 63.]

[Footnote 84: _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. pp. 164-166.]

[Footnote 85: _Proceedings American S.P.R._, pp. 350, 351.]