Chapter 14

Dr. Hibbert never even asks for the authority on which this legend reposes, certainly Balcarres does not tell the tale in his own report, or memoirs, for James II. (Bannatyne Club, 1841). The doctor then grumbles that he does not know 'a syllable of the state of Lord Balcarres's health at the time'. The friend of Bayle and of Marlborough, an honourable politician, a man at once loyal and plain-spoken in dealings with his master, Lord Balcarres's word would go for much, if he gave it. {190} But Dr. Hibbert asks for no authority, cites none. He only argues that, 'agreeably to the well- known doctrine of chances,' Balcarres might as well have this hallucination at the time of Dundee's death as at any other (p. 232). Now, that is a question which we cannot settle, without knowing whether Lord Balcarres was subject to hallucinations. If he was, cadit quaestio, if he was _not_, then the case is different. It is, manifestly, a problem in statistics, and only by statistics of wide scope, can it be solved. {191} But Dr. Hibbert was content to produce his easy solution, without working out the problem.

His second case is of 1662, and was taken down, he says, by the Bishop of Gloucester, from the lips of the father of Miss Lee. This young lady, in bed, saw a light, then a hallucination which called itself her mother. The figure prophesied the daughter's death at noon next day and at noon next day the daughter died. A physician, when she announced her vision, attended her, bled her, and could find nothing wrong in her health. Dr. Hibbert conjectures that her medical attendant did not know his business. 'The coincidence was _a fortunate one_,' that is all his criticism. Where there is no coincidence, the stories, he says, are forgotten. For that very reason, he should have collected contemporary stories, capable of being investigated, but that did not occur to Dr. Hibbert. His last case is the apparition of Mrs. Donne, with a dead child, to Dr. Donne, in Paris, as recorded by Walton. As Donne was a poet, very fond of his wife, and very anxious about her health, this case is not evidential, and may be dismissed for 'a fortuitous coincidence' (p. 332).

Certainly Dr. Hibbert could come to no conclusion, save his own, on the evidence he adduces. But it was by his own fault that he chose only evidence very remote, incapable of being cross-examined, and scanty, while we know that plenty of contemporary evidence was within his reach. Possibly the possessors of these experiences would not have put them at his disposal, but, if he could get no materials, he was in no position to form a theory. All this would have been recognised in any other matter, but in this obscure branch of psychology, beset, as it is, by superstition, science was content to be casual.

The error which lies at the opposite pole from Dr. Hibbert's mistake in not collecting instances, is the error of collecting only affirmative instances. We hear constantly about 'hallucinations of sight, sound, or touch, which suggest the presence of an absent person, and which occur simultaneously with some exceptional crisis in that person's life, or, most frequently of all, with his death'. {192} Now Mr. Gurney himself was much too fair a reasoner to avoid the collection of instantiae contradictoraes, examples in which the hallucination occurs, but does not coincide with any crisis whatever in the life of the absent person who seems to be present. Of these cases, Dr. Hibbert could find only one on record, in the Mercure Gallant, January, 1690. The writer tells us how he dreamed that a dead relation of his came to his bedside, and announced that he must die that day. Unlike Miss Lee, he went on living. Yet the dream impressed him so much that he noted it down in writing as soon as he awoke. Dr. Johnson also mentions an instantia contradictoria. A friend of Boswell's, near Kilmarnock, heard his brother's voice call him by name: now his brother was dead, or dying, in America. Johnson capped this by his tale of having, when at Oxford, heard his name pronounced by his mother. She was then at Lichfield, but nothing ensued. In Dr. Hibbert's opinion, this proves that coincidences, when they do occur, are purely matters of chance. {193a} There are many hallucinations, a death may correspond with one of them, that case is noted, the others are forgotten. Yet the coincidences are so many, or so striking, that when a Maori woman has a hallucination representing her absent husband, she may marry without giving him recognised ground for resentment, if he happens to be alive. This curious fact proves that the coincidence between death and hallucinatory presence has been marked enough to suggest a belief which can modify savage jealousy. {193b}

By comparing coincidental with non-coincidental hallucinations known to him, Mr. Gurney is said to have decided that the chances against a death coinciding with a hallucination, were forty to one,--long odds. {194a} But it is clear that only a very large collection of facts would give us any materials for a decision. Suppose that some 20,000 people answer such questions as:--

1. Have you ever had any hallucination?

2. Was there any coincidence between the hallucination and facts at the time unknown to you?

The majority of sane people will be able to answer the first question in the negative.

Of those who answer both questions in the affirmative, several things are to be said. First, we must allow for jokes, then for illusions of memory. Corroborative contemporary evidence must be produced. Again, of the 20,000, many are likely to be selected instances. The inquirer is tempted to go to a person who, as he or she already knows, has a story to tell. Again, the inquirers are likely to be persons who take an interest in the subject on the _affirmative_ side, and their acquaintances may have been partly chosen because they were of the same intellectual complexion. {194b}

All these drawbacks are acknowledged to exist, and are allowed for, and, as far as possible, provided against, by the very fair-minded people who have conducted this inquisition. Thus Mr. Henry Sidgwick, in 1889, said, 'I do not think we can be satisfied with less than 50,000 answers'. {195} But these 50,000 answers have not been received. When we reflect that, to our knowledge, out of twenty-five questions asked among our acquaintances in one place, _none_ would be answered in the affirmative: while, by selecting, we could get twenty-five affirmative replies, the delicacy and difficulty of the inquisition becomes painfully evident. Mr. Sidgwick, after making deductions on all sides of the most sportsmanlike character, still holds that the coincidences are more numerous by far than the Calculus of Probabilities admits. This is a question for the advanced mathematician. M. Richet once made some experiments which illustrate the problem. One man in a room thought of a series of names which, ex hypothesi, he kept to himself. Three persons sat at a table, which, as tables will do, 'tilted,' and each tilt rang an electric bell. Two other persons, concealed from the view of the table tilters, ran through an alphabet with a pencil, marking each letter at which the bell rang. These letters were compared with the names secretly thought of by the person at neither table.

He thought of The answers were

1. Jean Racine 1. Igard

2. Legros 2. Neghn

3. Esther 3. Foqdem

4. Henrietta 4. Higiegmsd

5. Cheuvreux 5. Dievoreq

6. Doremond 6. Epjerod

7. Chevalon 7. Cheval

8. Allouand 8. Iko

Here the non-mathematical reader will exclaim: 'Total failure, except in case 7!' And, about that case, he will have his private doubts. But, arguing mathematically, M. Richet proves that the table was right, beyond the limits of mere chance, by fourteen to two. He concludes, on the whole of his experiments, that, probably, intellectual force in one brain may be echoed in another brain. But MM. Binet and Fere, who report this, decide that 'the calculation of chances is, for the most part, incapable of affording a peremptory proof; it produces uncertainty, disquietude, and doubt'. {196} 'Yet something is gained by substituting doubt for systematic denial. Richet has obtained this important result, that henceforth the possibility of mental suggestion cannot be met with contemptuous rejection.'

Mental suggestion on this limited scale, is a phenomenon much less startling to belief than the reality, and causal nature, of coincidental hallucinations, of wraiths. But it is plain that, as far as general opinion goes, the doctrine of chances, applied to such statistics of hallucinations as have been collected, can at most, only 'produce uncertainty, disquietude, and doubt'. Yet if even these are produced, a step has been made beyond the blank negation of Hibbert.

The general reader, even if credulously inclined, is more staggered by a few examples of non-coincidental hallucinations, than confirmed by a pile of coincidental examples. Now it seems to be a defect in the method of the friends of wraiths, that they do not publish, with full and impressive details, as many examples of non-coincidental as of coincidental hallucinations. It is the _story_ that takes the public: if we are to be fair we must give the non-coincidental story in all its features, as is done in the matter of wraiths with a kind of message or meaning.

Let us set a good example, by adducing wraiths which, in slang phrase, were 'sells'. Those which we have at first hand are marked '(A),' those at second-hand '(B)'. But the world will accept the story of a ghost that failed on very poor evidence indeed.

1. (A) A young lady, in the dubious state between awake and asleep, unable, in fact, to feel certain whether she was awake or asleep, beheld her late grandmother. The old lady wept as she sat by the bedside.

'Why do you weep, grandmamma, are you not happy where you are?' asked the girl.

'Yes, I am happy, but I am weeping for your mother.'

'Is she going to die?'

'No, but she is going to lose you.'

'Am _I_ going to die, grandmamma?'

'Yes, my dear.'

'Soon?'

'Yes, my dear, very soon.'

The young lady, with great courage, concealed her dream from her mother, but confided it to a brother. She did her best to be good while she was on earth, where she is still, after an interval of many years.

Except for the conclusion, and the absence of a mystic bright light in the bedroom, this case exactly answers to that of Miss Lee, in 1662. Dr. Hibbert would have liked this example.

2. (B) A lady, staying with a friend, observed that one morning she was much depressed. The friend confided to her that, in the past night, she had seen her brother, dripping wet. He told her that he had been drowned by the upsetting of a boat, which was attached by a rope to a ship. At this time, he was on his way home from Australia. The dream, or vision, was recorded in writing. When next the first lady met her friend, she was entertaining her brother at luncheon. He had never even been in a boat dragged behind a ship, and was perfectly safe.

3. (B) A lady, residing at a distance from Oxford wrote to tell her son, who was at Merton College, that he had just entered her room and vanished. Was he well? Yes, he was perfectly well, and bowling for the College Eleven.

4. (B) A lady in bed saw her absent husband. He announced his death by cholera, and gave her his blessing, she, of course, was very anxious and miserable, but the vision was a lying vision. The husband was perfectly well.

In all these four cases, anxiety was caused by the vision, and in three at least, action was taken, the vision was recorded orally, or in writing. In the following set, the visions were waking hallucinations of sane persons never in any other instance hallucinated.

5. (A) A person of distinction, walking in a certain Cambridge quadrangle, met a very well-known clergyman. The former held out his hand, but there was before him only open space. No feeling of excitement or anxiety followed.

6. (A) The writer, standing before dinner, at a table in a large and brilliantly lit hall, saw the door of the drawing-room open, and a little girl, related to himself, come out, and run across the hall into another room. He spoke to her, but she did not answer. He instantly entered the drawing-room, where the child was sitting in a white evening-dress. When she ran across the hall, the moment before, she was dressed in dark blue serge. No explanation of the puzzle could be discovered, but it is fair to add that no anxiety was excited.

7. (A) A young lady had a cold, and was wearing a brown shawl. After lunch she went to her room. A few minutes later, her sister came out, saw her in the hall, and went upstairs after her, telling her an anecdote. At the top of the stairs, the brown-shawled sister vanished. The elder sister was in her room, in a white shawl. She was visible, when absent on another occasion, to another spectator.

In two other cases (A) ladies, in their usual health, saw their husbands in their rooms, when, in fact, they were in the drawing- room or study. Here then are eight cases of non-coincidental hallucination, some of people awake, some of people probably on the verge of sleep, which are wholly without 'coincidence,' wholly unveridical. None of the 'percipients' was addicted to seeing 'visions about.' {199}

On the other side, though the writer knows several people who have 'seen ghosts' in haunted houses, and other odd phenomena, he knows nobody, at first hand, who has seen a 'veridical hallucination,' or rather, knows only one, a very young one indeed. Thus, between these personally collected statistics of spectral 'sells' on one part, and the world-wide diffusion of belief in 'coincidental' hallucination on the other, the human mind is left in a balance which mathematics, and the Calculus of Probabilities (especially if one does not understand it) fail to affect.

Meanwhile, we still do not know what causes these solitary hallucinations of the sane. They can hardly come from diseased organs of sense, for these would not confine themselves to a single mistaken message of great vivacity. And why should either the 'sensory centre' or the 'central terminus' just once in a lifetime develop this uncanny activity, and represent to us a person to whom we may be wholly indifferent? The explanation is less difficult when the person represented is a husband or child, but even then, why does the activity occur once, and only once, and _not_ in a moment of anxiety?

The coincidental hallucinations are laid to the door of 'telepathy,' to 'a telepathic impact from the mind of an absent agent,' who is dying, or in some other state of rare or exciting experience, perhaps being married, as in Col. Meadows Taylor's case. This is a theory as old as Lavaterus, and was proclaimed by Mayo in the middle of the century; while, substituting 'angels' for human agents, Frazer of Tiree used it, in 1700, to explain second sight. Nay, it is the Norse theory of a 'sending' by a sorcerer, as we read in the Icelandic sagas. But, admitting that telepathy may be a cause of hallucinations, we often find the effect where the cause is not alleged to exist. Nobody, perhaps, will explain our nine empty hallucinations by 'telepathy,' yet, from the supposed effects of telepathy they were indistinguishable. Are all such cases of casual hallucination in the sane to be explained by telepathy, by an impact of force from a distant brain on the central terminus of our own brains? At all events, a casual hallucination of the presence of an absent friend need obviously cause us very little anxiety. We need not adopt the hypothesis of the Maoris.

The telepathic theory has the advantage of cutting down the marvellous to the minimum. It also accounts for that old puzzle, the clothes worn by the ghosts. These are reproduced by the 'agent's' theory of himself, perhaps with some unconscious assistance from 'the percipient'. For lack of this light on the matter, M. d'Assier, a positivist, who believed in spectres had to suggest that the ghosts wear the ghosts of garments! Thus positivism, in this disciple, returned to the artless metaphysics of savages. Telepathy saves the believer from such a humiliating relapse, and, perhaps, telepathy also may be made to explain 'collective' hallucinations, when several people see the same apparition. If a distant mind can thus demoralise the central terminus of one brain, it may do as much for two or more brains, or they may demoralise each other.

All this is very promising, but telepathy breaks down when the apparition causes some change in the relations of material objects. If there be a physical effect which endures after the phantasm has vanished, then there was an actual agent, a real being, a 'ghost' on the scene. For instance, the lady in Scott's ballad, 'The Eve of St. John,' might see and might hear the ghost of her lover by a telepathic hallucination of two senses. But if

The sable score, of fingers four, Remained on the board impressed

by the spectre, then there was no telepathic hallucination, but an actual being of an awful kind was in Smailholm Tower. Again, the cases in which dogs and horses, as Paracelsus avers, display terror when men and women behold a phantasm, are not easily accounted for by telepathy, especially when the beast is alarmed _before_ the man or woman suspects the presence of anything unusual. There is, of course, the notion that the horse shies, or the dog turns craven, in sympathy with its master's exhibition of fear. Owners of dogs and horses may counterfeit horror and see whether their favourites do sympathise. Cats don't. In one of three cases known to us where a cat showed consciousness of a spectral presence, the apparition _took the form of a cat_. The evidence is only that of Richard Bovet, in his Pandemonium; or, the Devil's Cloyster (1684). In Mr. J. G. Wood's Man and Beast, a lady tells a story of being alone, in firelight, playing with a favourite cat, Lady Catherine. Suddenly puss bristled all over, her back rose in an arch, and the lady, looking up, saw a hideously malignant female watching her. Lady Catherine now rushed wildly round the room, leaped at the upper panels of the door, and seemed to have gone mad. This new terror recalled the lady to herself. She shrieked, and the phantasm vanished. She saw it on a later day. In a third case, a cat merely kept a watchful eye on the ghost, and adopted a dignified attitude of calm expectancy. If beasts can be telepathically affected, then beasts have more of a 'psychical' element in their composition than they usually receive credit for; whereas if a ghost is actually in view, there is no reason why beasts should not see it.

The best and most valid proof that an abnormal being is actually present was that devised by the ghost of Sir Richard of Coldinghame in the ballad, and by the Beresford ghost, who threw a heavy curtain over the bed-pole. Unluckily, Sir Richard is a poetical figment, and the Beresford ghost is a myth, like William Tell: he may be traced back through various mediaeval authorities almost to the date of the Norman Conquest. We have examined the story in a little book of folklore, Etudes Traditionistes. Always there is a compact to appear, always the ghost burns or injures the hand or wrist of the spectator. A version occurs in William of Malmesbury.

What we need, to prove a ghost, and disprove an _exclusively_ telepathic theory, is a ghost who is not only seen, heard, or even touched, but a ghost who produces some change in physical objects. Most provokingly, there are agencies at every successful seance, and in every affair of the Poltergeist, who do lift tables, chairs, beds, bookcases, candles, and so forth, while others play accordions. But then nobody or not everybody _sees_ these agencies at work, while the spontaneous phantasms which are _seen_ do not so much as lift a loo-table, generally speaking. In the spiritualistic cases, we have the effect, with no visible cause; in ghost stories, we have the visible presence, but he very seldom indeed causes any physical change in any object. No ghost who does not do this has any strict legal claim to be regarded as other than a telepathic hallucination at best, though, as we shall see, some presumptions exist in favour of some ghosts being real entities.

These rare facts have not escaped a ghost-hunter so intelligent as Mrs. Henry Sidgwick. This lady is almost too sportsmanlike, for a psychical researcher, in her habit of giving an apparition the benefit of every imaginable doubt which may absolve him from the charge of being a real genuine ghost. 'It is true,' she says, 'that ghosts are alleged sometimes to produce a physical effect on the external world;' but to admit this is 'to come into prima facie collision with the physical sciences' (an awful risk to run), so Mrs. Sidgwick, in a rather cavalier manner leaves ghosts who produce physical effects to be dealt with among the phenomena alleged to occur at seances. Now this is hardly fair to the spontaneous apparition, who is doing his very best to demonstrate his existence in the only convincing way. The phenomena of seances are looked on with deserved distrust, and, generally, may be regarded as an outworn mode of swindling. Yet it is to this society that Mrs. Sidgwick relegates the most meritorious and conscientious class of apparitions.